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.
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.
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.
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."
