The Three Stags' Heads opens at four o'clock on a Thursday, and not before. Friday the same. Weekends and bank holidays it manages all day. This is the sort of pub that keeps the hours it wants to keep, and it has earned the right: it is around 300 years old, Grade II listed, and on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, which is a national register of pubs whose insides are worth protecting. Two small rooms, stone-flagged floors, low ceilings, a cast-iron range. Lurchers on the floor, usually.
The beer is Abbeydale, exclusively, and the house ale is Black Lurcher — 8%, named after a former landlord's dog. It is worth knowing the strength before you order a second. The food is not restaurant food and doesn't pretend to be: Hancock's pork pies with pickles, pickled eggs from the jar on the bar. A Tripadvisor reviewer titled their write-up "My new favourite peaks pub," which is the kind of thing people say and mean here.
For years the pub displayed a mummified cat, found in the chimney during alterations and put there, long ago, to ward off something or other. Andy and Cath have run the place since 2019. Before them it belonged to Geoff and Pat Fuller, who also ran a pottery on the premises. Neil Gaiman credits a visit here — "cat, lurchers and all" — with inspiring the opening of his short story "Black Dog."
That is more or less the whole of Wardlow's commerce. There is no shop, no butcher, no farm shop; the village is a single road strung along a high limestone plateau, population 118 at the last census. For a loaf of bread you go to Tideswell, two miles off, or Bakewell, fifteen minutes by car. Well-provisioned it is not. The A623 runs past, the buses run along it, and everything else you'll want a car for.
South of the road is Wardlow Hay Cop, a near-perfect cone of a hill, 370 metres to a trig point at the top. Beneath the summit grass sits a Bronze Age burial mound that nobody has dug up. From there the views open over Cressbrook Dale, and a six-mile circular loops down through the dale past Peter's Stone. Orchids come up in Tansley Dale in spring. The Monsal Trail, traffic-free and flat, is five minutes away by car for anyone who has had enough of hills.
Peter's Stone has a grimmer claim. In 1815 Antony Lingard of Litton murdered Hannah Oliver, the toll-house keeper at Wardlow Mires, for her money and her shoes. He was hanged at Derby and his body brought back and hung in an iron cage on the rock for over eleven years — the last man gibbeted in Derbyshire. A Stoney Middleton cobbler named Marsden gave the shoe evidence that convicted him.
The church, the Good Shepherd, is a modest Victorian one from 1873. The village hall was the school before that.
Each September the village dresses a well, the old Derbyshire way, and for a weekend the single road has somewhere to gather.
