The main street of Winster climbs the hillside in a terrace of reddish-grey limestone, and once a year people run up it carrying frying pans. The Shrove Tuesday pancake races have categories for senior citizens, ladies, men and children, and they happen along the same slope you'd otherwise be puffing up with the shopping. It is a village built on a gradient, roughly 700 to 900 feet above the ground between Matlock and Bakewell, and it has arranged itself around the incline rather than against it.
There are two pubs. The Old Bowling Green, on East Bank, dates to 1472 and has been run by the same resident owners, David and Marilyn, since 1990. It's a free house that serves street food in baskets and, on select dates, hand-stretched stone-baked pizza, with real ales rotating through and boules in the beer garden. Well-behaved dogs are welcome.
The Miners Standard, up at Bank Top, was built around 1653 as a farmhouse and later found itself surrounded by a miners' shanty-town as the lead workings crept down the valley. Its name is the miner's dish, the standard measure once used for lead ore. Inside there's a wood-burning stove and home-made food — soup, chunky sub rolls, fish and chips, gammon with pineapple, fish pie, lasagne, steak pie, and a Sunday lunch. The pies get singled out for praise. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "good honest pub food in the surroundings of a proper country pub in an old lead mining district," and noted that the dogs get treats from the bar staff or the regulars.
The village keeps a shop with a post office, a garage, a primary school, a church and a Methodist chapel — enough to see out a week without a car, though you'll want one. The 172 bus runs along Main Street between Bakewell and Matlock via Youlgreave; the nearest station is Matlock, about five miles off on the Derwent Valley Line.
The walking radiates outward. The Limestone Way passes close by, and circular routes leave in every direction through limestone pasture and old mining country. North, on Stanton Moor, is the Nine Ladies Stone Circle — a Bronze Age ring named for nine women said to have been turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath.
The church of St John the Baptist has a Georgian tower dated 1721 and a body rebuilt in the 1840s. Its chancel south window is by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co. in 1883, which is a considerable thing to find in a village church of this size.
Winster was wealthy once. The mining boom of 1720 to 1770 pushed the population past 2,000, and by 1751 there were 24 inns and alehouses. Two remain. The Domesday surveyors valued the whole place at a pound.
In 1906 the National Trust bought the Market House for £50 — its first property in the Peak District. The Morris dancers still turn out sixteen strong, in two files of eight, in white shirts and bells, as they have on and off since 1863.
