Al Fresco & Wild · Buxton, Derbyshire
Lover's Leap, Ashwood Dale
Spice 1/5 · Chilled
Ashwood Dale's Lover's Leap carried an elopement story and helped sell Buxton's picturesque landscape—the named place is historic, but the lovers belong to folklore.
The story
A map of the Duke of Devonshire's lands names the Buxton feature by 1775. Its familiar story has two lovers escaping pursuing parents on a single horse and leaping towards a wedding at Peak Forest. The place-name is documented; the incident is not. The legend is best understood as part of the picturesque tourism that taught visitors how to read dramatic scenery as a theatre of forbidden love.
Visiting today
Buxton is a spa town in High Peak, Derbyshire, and England's highest market town. The River Wye rises just west of it and runs east through the Wye Valley, a limestone gorge; this site lies in that valley east of the town centre.
- Council
- High Peak, Derbyshire
- Ward
- Stone Bench
- County
- Derbyshire
- Region
- East Midlands
- Nation
- England
- Constituency
- High Peak
- OS grid reference
- SK 071 727
Landmarks nearby
- Buxton Crescent · 2.7 km — Grade I listed; built 1780 to 1789
- Buxton Opera House · 2.8 km — 902-seat opera house in The Square
- Poole's Cavern · 3.1 km — Natural limestone cave and SSSI on Buxton's edge
Sources
Nearby on the map
Stoney Middleton's Lover's Leap has something most cliffs with that name lack: a woman traceable in the parish record, a reported fall, and a story that ends in survival rather than romantic invention.
Fact & fictionHot spotScandal & SocietyChatsworth (Georgiana's ménage à trois)Bakewell, Derbyshire · EnglandSpice 4/5 · HotFor some 25 years the celebrity duchess Georgiana shared her marriage and her home with her husband and her best friend Bess Foster in the most famous ménage à trois of the age; Georgiana's own affair with the future PM Charles Grey produced a secret daughter.
Documented historyQueer HeritageMillthorpe (Edward Carpenter & George Merrill)Millthorpe, Derbyshire · EnglandSpice 2/5 · WarmThe market-garden home where the socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter lived openly with George Merrill decades before decriminalisation — sandal-making, vegetarianism and 'the intermediate sex' in the Derbyshire hills. A touch on the backside from Merrill, E.M
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.