Buxton

Buxton is an anomaly. It sits at 307 metres above sea level, making it one of the highest market towns in England, and it was developed as a spa resort in the eighteenth century by the fifth Duke of Devonshire on the model of Bath — a parallel that was ambitious and only partially successful but produced, in the attempt, a Georgian crescent and an opera house and a thermal spring complex that together create one of the more unexpected town centres in the north of England. The Crescent, when I visited, was in the late stages of a decade-long restoration, its stone facade finally cleaned of its Victorian grime and its rooms being converted into a hotel and spa. Scaffolding still covered the left wing when I walked past, but even incomplete you could see what the Duke had imagined: a formal horseshoe of honey-coloured stone around the natural spring, Bath imported to the Peak District by ducal ambition.

The thermal spring produces 250,000 gallons of water a day at a constant 28°C, which the Romans knew about — there is a Roman altar in the museum — and which the Victorians bottled commercially in a rivalry with Buxton Water that continues in the supermarket aisle to this day. You can fill a bottle at St Ann’s Well, a modest stone fountain in the Crescent gardens, for free. The water has a faint mineral taste, neither unpleasant nor remarkable, the kind of water that you have to believe is good for you because the alternative is that you are standing on a cold street drinking tap water from a stone spigot.

The town rewards walking without agenda. The Pavilion Gardens, opened in 1871, run along the River Wye before it descends through the hills — formal flower beds and Victorian ironwork structures and a bandstand that looks like it is waiting for something it has been waiting for since 1900. The Opera House, designed by Frank Matcham in 1903 with his trademark rococo excess, hosts the Buxton International Festival in July and August, which has grown into one of the more serious operatic events in the north, drawing casts from the major companies. It seems wrong that opera happens here, in a market town above 300 metres with a Wetherspoons on the corner, but Matcham’s theatre has the acoustics and the capacity and the programming follows from that.

The market is on Tuesday and Saturday and smells correctly of wet vegetables and fresh bread in the way that outdoor markets should smell. There is a good independent bookshop on the main street and a café called Columbine that does lunch with a confidence that larger cities sometimes lack — the kind of café where the soup of the day is genuinely the point and the bread to accompany it is baked on premises. I had a mushroom and leek soup there in October that remains in the canon of good soup I have eaten, which is a longer list than you might expect.

Out of the town centre, the moors begin almost immediately. Axe Edge Moor to the southwest is the source of five rivers — the Dove, Manifold, Goyt, Dane, and Wye — a hydrological fact that makes Buxton feel like the pivot point of something larger than itself. Walking up to Axe Edge from town takes an hour and puts you on moorland that feels absolutely remote despite the town spread below. On clear days you can see into Wales. On unclear days, which is most days, you are in the cloud and the world ends at fifty metres.

When to go: July and August for the opera festival, if that is your interest — book well in advance. October for the moor walks and autumn colour in the Pavilion Gardens. The town is busy in summer but has enough substance to absorb visitors. Winter is quiet and the Crescent, now restored, makes a genuinely memorable place to stay when the moors outside are frosted and the spring water is its constant 28°C.