Peak Forest is a small village on the main road the (A623) from Chapel-en-le-Frith to Chesterfield in Derbyshire.
The village grew from the earlier settlement of Dam (still inhabited, with a number of houses and farms) at the conjunction of Perrydale and Damdale. There is an inn, a church and a primary school. Its name probably derives from the Forest of High Peak.
Its church is dedicated to 'Charles, King & Martyr' (King Charles I of England, executed in 1649). First erected in 1657, it was replaced in 1878 as a gift from the Duke of Devonshire. Until an Act of Parliament was passed in 1804 its minister was able to perform marriages without the need for reading the banns, and the village was known as the Gretna Green of Derbyshire.
The Peak Forest Canal, although originally aiming for the limestone quarries in Great Rocks Dale just to the south of the village, never reached nearer than Buxworth, seven miles away, where it terminates at Bugsworth Basin. The original limestone-carrying purpose of the canal was replaced long ago by the mineral railway line serving the quarries around Buxton and joining the Manchester–Sheffield line, via a couple of magnificent diverging viaducts over the Black Brook valley at Chapel Milton (between Chapel-en-le-Frith and Chinley). Its railway station (now closed) was built by the Midland Railway, two miles away at Small Dale. This was on its extension of the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock and Midlands Junction Railway, part of the main Midland Line from Manchester to London. It was also the northern junction for the line from Buxton.
Famous quotes containing the words peak and/or forest:
“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)