Where do you think that the highest village in Britian is?
Until recently if you’d asked me I’d have guessed somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, or failing that perhaps the Cumbrian Lake District, Yorkshire Dales or Snowdonia.
I would not have guessed that Britian’s highest village was in the midlands. Let alone in Staffordshire, to be precise.
Yet it is.
Flash – a village of dozens of people – stands at 463 metres above sea level. Whilst it’s title is disputed, that makes it officially the highest village in the UK.
Part of Staffordshire Moorlands District, it sits inside the Peak District National Park.
These days the village is in an isolated and windswept location. Isolated that is apart from the A53 between Buxton and Leek which runs along the edge of the settlement.
However, apart from the motorcyclists, cyclists, van drivers, car users and walkers who call in at the homely little cafe in a lay-by, the cars zooming past at around 60 miles per-hour seem rather detached from the isolated clusters of houses and farmsteads around them, clustered on the southern edge of Axe Edge Moor. There are buses between Buxton and Leek (5 and 7 miles away respectively) but they call only three times a day each way.
In the Middle Ages Flash was a centre for coal mining, digging the seams which later brought heavy industry to more westerly parts of north Staffordshire.
However, this trade had dried up by the Early Modern period and the population stagnated.
Not unlike the jurisdictional confusion which provided an aid to the development of Birmingham and the Black Country as manufacturing, trading and mining centres, Flash was a somewhat lawless place.
To this day as one of the most northerly settlements in Staffordshire it is out on an administrative limb. The parish that Flash sits within is bounded to north west by Cheshire and to the north east by Derbyshire.
Coupled with the inhospitable terrain this historically made the village a haven for squatters, highway men and coiners. Eking out an outlaw living on the windswept hillsides amongst the crags and fast flowing streams which eventually turn into the Manifold and the Goyt, then eventually the Trent and the Mersey.
At a later date once a mixture of land seizure by the rich and powerful, technological innovation, and more pervasive policing, had put paid to squatting, highway robbery and coining, illegal sports like bare knuckle prize fighting became local mainstays.
In the mid to late 19th Century if the constabulary of Cheshire, Derbyshire or Staffordshire was seen approaching then the fight organisers would just pick up the ring and quickly move it over the boundary to another county where the approaching constables had no authority.
Today – like much of the Peak District Flash is an interesting mixture of the agricultural, with sheep farms backing onto the village’s short main street, and the touristic with many houses given over the holiday lets. It retains a pub, a church and a postbox, whilst the cafe also serves as a shop.
It is well worth a visit, whether to imagine its wild, lawless past, or just to admire the scenery and marvel at the fact that you are stood in a village with plenty of majestic peaks either level with, or below you. Whether as part of a walk in its own right or on a trip to the Three Shire’s Head Pack Horse Bridge, heading up Axe Edge Moor, or searching out the source of the Manifold, the Goyt or the Dane.
