About Bakewell
The history, geography, and character of Bakewell.
Bakewell is a market town on the River Wye in Derbyshire, inside the Peak District National Park. It is built of sandstone around the Square, where the Rutland Arms stands, and the bridge over the Wye at the bottom of Bridge Street. Most people come for the pudding, and the town is happy to sell it to them in three different shops, but it is also a working market town: Monday brings stalls into the centre and cattle and sheep to the Agricultural Business Centre across the river. The Monsal Trail starts on the edge of town, and the town has no railway station; the nearest is Matlock. Chatsworth and Haddon Hall are a few kilometres away and are not part of this guide.
History & Heritage
The pudding is not the tart
The Bakewell pudding is puff pastry, a layer of strawberry jam and a soft filling of eggs, sugar and almonds, best eaten warm. The Bakewell tart, as both the Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop and Bloomers describe it, is shortcrust pastry, jam and an almond sponge, often iced. The Old Original says the tart came later, in the 20th century. The usual origin story is that the cook at the White Horse inn got a recipe wrong, but the details do not hold still: the Old Original puts it around 1860, the Bakewell Tart Shop's own heritage page points out that the White Horse was demolished in 1803 and that a Bakewell pudding recipe was in print by 1845, and Bloomers says it is still researching the truth. Each shop says its own is the real thing. Try more than one.
A market town that still has a market
Derbyshire Dales District Council says Bakewell has had a market since 1330, and the Monday stall market still fills the centre. The livestock sales are across the river at the purpose-built Agricultural Business Centre, which the Princess Royal opened in February 1999, according to Bagshaws, the auctioneers who run the sales there every Monday and Thursday. Wikipedia records the Bakewell Show, an August agricultural show, running from 1819 to 2017; since 2022 the Bakewell Agricultural and Horticultural Society has held a one-day Bakewell Country Festival on its Showground instead, which ran on Sunday 12 July in 2026.
Bridge, church and old house
Three buildings tell the long story. The bridge over the Wye is listed Grade I and dated to about 1300, though the county's Historic Environment Record notes that some researchers think it later. All Saints' Church on the hill has two Anglo-Saxon crosses in its churchyard and round Norman arches in the west wall surviving from William Peverel's church of 1110. The Old House Museum up the lane was built as a tithe house in 1534 and later became cottages for workers at Richard Arkwright's mill at Lumford.
The railway that left
The Midland line through Bakewell closed in the late 1960s, and its trackbed is now the Monsal Trail, which runs from Coombs Road on the edge of town through the old Bakewell station and Hassop Station to Headstone Viaduct and on to Blackwell near Buxton. The nearest station today is Matlock, and the TransPeak bus does the last stretch.