A hollow above the dale
Wormhill
A quiet White Peak village of drystone walls, canal history and a sudden descent to the River Wye.
- Best for
- Gorge walking and railway-trail cycling
- Give it
- A half day for the village and nearby dale
- Don't miss
- Chee Dale's riverside stepping-stones
Photo: Dave.Dunford · CC BY-SA 4.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with a dramatic way out
Wormhill is quiet at street level, but its memorial, unusual church tower and footpath into Chee Dale reward a deliberate stop.
There is no working pub or shop to organise a visit around. Instead, the village offers James Brindley's story on the green, St Margaret's distinctive helm roof and a landscape that falls sharply towards the River Wye. Nearby trails and Buxton add enough variety for a fuller day.
Your picks, your pace
Make Wormhill yours
Choose a mood or build your own list. Your saved stops are an ordering aid, with a direct map route when you are ready.
Local signatures
3 placesChurch of St Margaret
A largely 1864 church whose medieval tower base supports an unusual helm roof with decorative banded and diamond slating; the churchyard also holds the village stocks and a sundial-topped cross shaft.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Wormhill
Pavilion Gardens
Gardens in the nearby spa town of Buxton, suited to a gentler outdoor stop between the village and the town's attractions.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour 15 minutes
- Locality
- Buxton
Poole's Cavern and Country Park
A Buxton show cave and country park, with the Solomon's Temple viewpoint on Grin Low.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours
- Locality
- Buxton
Walks & outdoors
1 place
Chee Dale
A limestone gorge and riverside reserve with ash, yew and rock whitebeam woodland, wildflowers and stepping-stones beneath towering crags.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours 30 minutes
- Locality
- below Wormhill
History & heritage
2 places
Brindley Memorial
A stone drinking fountain with troughs, built in 1875 to remember canal engineer James Brindley, who was born in the parish.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Wormhill village green
Church of St John the Baptist, Tideswell
The Tideswell church known as the Cathedral of the Peak, paired with a village that also has independent shops, pubs and cafés.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Tideswell
Things to do
2 places
Monsal Trail
An 8.5-mile traffic-free former railway route running over viaducts and through tunnels towards Bakewell.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2 hours
- Locality
- access from Millers Dale
Buxton Opera House
Buxton's opera house adds a cultural stop to a visit that begins with Wormhill's landscape and local history.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour
- Locality
- Buxton
No places match this filter. Choose All places to reset the list.
On the map
Wormhill at a glance
Tap a marker to jump to its guide card.
Three ways to explore Wormhill
Signature outings
Read Brindley's memorial
Pause at the 1875 fountain and troughs commemorating canal engineer James Brindley, born in Wormhill parish.
Take the Chee Dale stepping-stones
Follow the River Wye beneath limestone crags and cross the famous riverside stepping-stones.
Ride the Monsal Trail
Walk or cycle the traffic-free former railway over viaducts and through tunnels.
The village story
Wormhill Village Guide
Canal history, a curious church tower and the limestone dales below a self-contained White Peak village.
Brindley's quiet village
The Brindley Memorial stands on the village green: a stone drinking fountain with troughs, built in 1875 and inscribed "In memory of James Brindley, Canal Engineer, Born in this parish AD1716." Brindley was born at Tunstead, a hamlet in the parish, and as a boy led grain wagons down to the mill at Millers Dale. He was semi-literate, and he went on to design over 300 miles of canal, starting with the Duke of Bridgewater's in 1759. The fountain dispenses water rather than answers.
Wormhill has no pub. The Bagshaw Arms — named for the Bagshawe family, lords of the manor since the fifteenth century — closed and became a private house. The village school did the same. There are no shops, no butcher, no deli. For those you go to Tideswell, five miles off, or Buxton, six. This is an upland hollow on the White Peak limestone plateau, ringed by drystone walls and sheep, and it keeps to itself.
The drop into limestone dales
What it has instead is the ground falling away to the south. Below the village the land drops into Chee Dale, a limestone gorge where the River Wye runs under towering crags, with stepping-stones carrying the path along the water at the foot of the cliffs. The woodland is ash, yew and rock whitebeam; in spring the floor comes up in cowslips, early purple orchids, rock rose and Jacob's ladder. A footpath south from the village descends straight into it.
The Wormhill, Millers Dale and Monks Dale circular is about 4.3 miles with 866 feet of ascent — moderate, through the Derbyshire Dales National Nature Reserve and back along the Wye on a stretch of the Monsal Trail. The trail itself is 8.5 miles of former railway, closed in 1968, running traffic-free over viaducts and through tunnels toward Bakewell.
Helm roof, meadow and wolves
St Margaret's is Grade II* listed. Only the base of the tower is medieval; the rest was almost entirely rebuilt in 1864. The tower carries a "helm" roof in the manner of Sompting in Sussex, with banded and diamond slating, and gets called one of Derbyshire's most remarkable curiosities. Inside are pews carved by Advent Hunstone, of the Tideswell woodcarving family. In the churchyard stand the original village stocks and a cross shaft topped with a 1670 sundial.
The Domesday surveyors recorded Wormhill in 1086 with no villagers, no plough teams, and twenty acres of meadow — effectively waste, held by Henry de Ferrers. The last wolf in England is said to have been killed at Wormhill Hall in the fifteenth century. The Hall, built in 1697, is still the Bagshawe seat.
Rails, roads and dressed wells
Getting here means a car: minor lanes off the A6, Buxton fifteen minutes away, and a Stagecoach 65 bus roughly every two hours. Millers Dale station served the village until 1967; its line is the Monsal Trail now.
Twice each summer the village dresses its wells — the main one at the Brindley fountain, and a smaller one made by the children, shown in the church. In 1794 the vicar, William Bagshawe, came across boys playing football on a Sunday and, as he recorded it, "spoke to them but was laughed at and on my departure one of the boys gave the ball a wonderful kick – a proof this of the degeneracy of human nature."
Stay around Peak District
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Peak District, linked directly to their property pages.
Leek
Lisa's House Leek: 20mins Alton Towers
- Sleeps 6
- 2 bedrooms
Leek
The Rudyard Suite - Large 1 Bed Apartment
- Sleeps 5
- 1 bedroom
Leek
The Roaches Suite - Large 2 Bedroom Apartment
- Sleeps 7
- 2 bedrooms
Leek
The Moorlands Suite - 1 Bed Apartment
- Sleeps 4
- 1 bedroom
Leek
Amy's House: 20mins Alton Towers
- Sleeps 6
- 2 bedrooms
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Each photograph remains credited to its named creator and is reused under the linked Creative Commons licence. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:The Brindley Memorial Fountain.jpg — photograph by Dave.Dunford; Own work. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
- File:Footpath between Chee Dale and Wormhill - geograph.org.uk - 1859365.jpg — photograph by Jonathan Clitheroe; Footpath between Chee Dale and Wormhill by Jonathan Clitheroe. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
- File:Monsal Trail, view from Lime Kilns near Miller's Dale - geograph.org.uk - 5834408.jpg — photograph by Gareth James; Monsal Trail: view from Lime Kilns near Miller's Dale by Gareth James. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.