The Peak Forest Canal ends in the middle of Whaley Bridge, at a stone warehouse where narrowboats once handed their cargo straight onto railway wagons. The Transhipment Warehouse still stands on the basin, open to visitors most days except Tuesdays, and once a year it becomes the backdrop to the Whaley Water Weekend canal festival.
There are three pubs worth knowing. The Cock Pub & Kitchen sits on the A6 at 22 Buxton Road, a Robinsons house that draws walkers and canal boaters. The Sunday roast beef gets described as thick cut and soft enough to fall apart, under Yorkshire puddings reviewers keep calling huge. There's gluten-free fish and chips, ginger sponge and lemon meringue for afters, log fires in winter and a beer garden in summer. Food runs Tuesday to Saturday and Sunday, nothing on Mondays. CAMRA called it "a fantastic traditional pub."
The pub was once the Cock Hotel, run by the actress Betty Driver and her sister Freda after Driver quit acting. A Coronation Street producer traced her there in 1969 and asked whether she'd rather be serving pints in the Rovers Return. She said yes, and played Betty Turpin — of Betty's Hot Pot — for over forty years.
The Goyt Inn is an end-of-terrace local, CAMRA-listed, with four changing beers and a small patio garden and a reputation for being "characterful, dog friendly and welcoming." The Shepherds Arms is a whitewashed former farmhouse whose taproom has kept its open fire, flagstone floor and scrubbed tables. CAMRA lists the flagstones as historic and calls the taproom "a delight."
For provisions there's The Bridge Bakehouse, run by Camilla Dignan, doing French patisserie alongside sandwiches and savoury bakes. Two butchers — Edwin Wild & Son on Old Road, and Hazeldines, which claims to be the original home of the "Butchers Wrap." Buttercup Cakes is up on Buxton Road.
The walking is the point. The Town Trail is a two-mile loop along an old railway, through a short tunnel under Chapel Road and up towards Toddbrook Dam. Head southwest on the Midshires Way and you're into the Goyt Valley, past Toddbrook to the Errwood and Fernilee reservoirs. The Cromford & High Peak Railway trail runs the full fifteen miles back towards Buxton. Combs Reservoir has a gentle two-mile circular; Eccles Pike, an isolated gritstone hill, has the climb.
Toddbrook Reservoir is the one you may remember from the news. In August 2019 its spillway gave way, 1,500 residents were evacuated for six days, an RAF Chinook dropped sandbags into the scour hole and 150 firefighters pumped the level down. The dam held. It is being rebuilt.
The town station is on the Buxton line, an hourly Northern service; the 199 "Skyline" bus runs every half hour between Buxton, Stockport and Manchester Airport. St James' Church, in the parish of Taxal, is Grade II* — a Gothic tower over earlier fabric, the rest rebuilt in 1825. The Domesday Book records nothing here at all: in 1086 this was open moorland, later swallowed into the royal Macclesfield Forest.
Come June the town gives itself over to a carnival month — a well dressing, a Rose Queen carnival that has been going over a hundred years, and the Whaley Waltz fell race, which sends more than 180 runners up into the hills.
