Brassington

There was a time when Brassington lay on the main route between London and Manchester, and two of its old coaching inns - at least one of them haunted - are still in business. Less than a mile away are Harborough Rocks, worth the climb for magnificent 360 degree views over and beyondthe White Peak. In the 1720s Daniel Defoe encountered a lead miner’s family living in a cave near Brassington, the wife a ‘well-shaped ... comely woman’, but her miner husband was ‘lean as a skeleton, pale as a dead corps, his hair and beard a deep black, his skin lank ... something of the colour of the lead itself’. He had just emerged from working at 60 fathoms (360ft) below ground.