More Than a Pudding: Bakewell & the Villages By Heart

Next time you're stood in the queue at the Co-op on Market Street, have a think about what used to be there.

Until 1998, that was the cattle market. Every Monday, right in the middle of town. Pens, wagons, the auctioneer rattling through the lots, and the shops carrying on round it like it was the most normal thing in the world.

There's been a Monday market in Bakewell for over 700 years. The beasts only went over the river within living memory. Plenty of people still walk past and picture the pens.

Most visitors never see that Bakewell. Coach in at eleven, the bridge, the ducks, the love locks, a pudding (not a tart), and gone by four. This book is for everyone else.

Get the book now: instant download

Who it's for

• If you grew up here, it's the town you remember, with the dates and the names put back on it.
• If you moved away, it's a way home for an evening with a brew.
• If you've been coming for years, it's the Bakewell behind the one you know, and the villages you keep driving through on the way.
• If you're thinking of moving here, it's the honest bit too: Mondays, summer traffic, what living inside a national park actually means, and which village suits which kind of life.

What's inside

• Market day, then and now. The cattle market in town, the move over the river, and how to do a Monday without losing your rag: when to come, where to park, and what's on at the Agricultural Business Centre.
• The bridges. The old town bridge, and Holme Bridge from 1664, built so narrow for the packhorses that it has little refuges in the walls to tuck yourself into.
• Lumford. Richard Arkwright's third cotton mill, nearly as big as both his Cromford mills put together, and the son he sent to live by the river and learn the trade.
• All Saints. Two Saxon crosses from the 800s, the carved stones in the porch that were dug up in the 1840s, and the Vernon tombs that tie the church to Haddon.
• The pudding. Where the story comes from, told straight, and no picking sides between the shops.
• Ruskin and the railway. How the line he hated became the trail everyone loves, and when to walk it so you've got it to yourself.
• The villages, one by one. Ashford in the Water, Great and Little Longstone, Hassop, Over Haddon and Lathkill Dale, Youlgreave, Rowsley, Pilsley and Edensor, Monyash and Sheldon.
• Well dressings, village by village. Roughly when each one is on, so you stop finding out the week after.
• Haddon or Chatsworth? An honest answer for when you've only got the one day.
• Quiet Bakewell. The hours, the seasons and the corners when it still feels like yours.
• Your Bakewell. Pages at the back for your own memories, because the best of this town was never written down.

Free updates

Dates move every year, the well dressings included. Whenever the book is updated, you get the new version free.

The easy bit

It's a digital book. Once you've paid, the download link comes straight to your email. It opens on a phone, tablet or computer, and you can print it at home if you'd rather hold it in your hands. No app, no account, nothing to install.

Know someone who moved away?

It makes a lovely present for anyone who grew up round here and ended up somewhere else. Buy it, forward them the email, done. With Christmas coming, it might be the easiest present you send this year.

Yes, I want More Than a Pudding

Bakewell has always been more than a pudding. This is the rest of it.