Distance: 4.3 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk north along the Tissington Trail from Ashbourne, the gateway to the southern Peak District, to the village of Tissington, supposedly the original home of the White Peak’s well dressing tradition.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Where Well Dressing Springs From
Well dressing is a longstanding custom in parts of Derbyshire and Staffordshire’s White Peak.
The precise form of custom and rationale underpinning the tradition differs slightly from place to place. However, it always comprises the creation of colourful pictorial decorations on large clay boards with flower petals, mosses and other natural materials during the warmer parts of the year. These are placed near wells or other watercourses in the middle of the towns and villages where the well dressing custom takes place.
Well dressings typically depict biblical or other religious scenes and iconography or else mark anniversaries and important moments in the wider culture. Members of the community volunteer to make the dressings and their unveiling is typically accompanied by a communal gathering, celebration and fete-like events. Broadly speaking the well dressing custom is considered a collective expression and celebration of community.
In recent times the custom has extended far beyond the region of the Peak District where it originated, spreading across the northern and eastern Midlands, and beyond. However, the origins of the tradition quite possibly lie in the village of Tissington, in the far south of the Peak District, just north of Ashbourne, near the boundary of the National Park.
Tissington is a small village with a population of no more than 160 people, widely dispersed along two main roads, presided over by a large Jacobean hall (still inhabited by the family which has owned the village and surrounding lands since the 15th Century) and St. Mary’s a small church on top of a low ridge, which has a tower dating back to the 11th or 12th Century.
It is believed that the custom of dressing Tissington’s wells – of which there are six – began in either the 14th or 17th Century. In the former case it was because the village was spared by the first wave of the Black Death in 1348. While in the latter, it was because the village’s wells kept flowing during a terrible drought in 1615.
These days the well dressing typically takes place in the latter part of May. In a typical year 50,000 people have descended on the village during the week long well dressing to see the decorations. Tissington may now be far from the only place to have an annual well dressing ceremony. However, the numbers drawn each year to the village’s well dressing and dozens like it in the Peak District and beyond, is testimony to this folk custom’s ability to bring people together.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
Ashbourne does not have a railway connection. So this walk to Tissington begins from the town’s small bus station, on the edge of central Ashbourne, not far from a small 1980s vintage branch of Sainsbury’s.
Upon alighting from the bus (there are regular, hourly, services throughout the day from Derby and Uttoexeter where there are railway stations, as well buses from Belper, which also has a station) turn right, walking past the entrance to the Sainsbury’s car park.
You approach a major road. Crossing over the bus station road reaching the mouth of the road where it intersects with the main road, there is a crossing set of pedestrian traffic lights to your right.
Use the traffic lights to cross the main road.
On the far side of the road there is a small snicket, bounded by metal devices designed to stop motorbikes and scooters, leading down onto the trackbed of the former Ashbourne to Buxton railway which closed in 1967. It was a fairly short lived railway having only opened in the 1890s. Today it is the Tissington Trail, a cycle and bridle path also popular with walkers, leading up to Parsley Hay where it intersects with the High Peak Trail, another former railway line.
When you reach the Tissington Trail turn right. Walk a short distance towards the mouth of the tunnel leading beneath Ashbourne town centre.
Walk through the tunnel. It brings you out into the car park of the Ashbourne cycle hire centre at the base of the Tissington Trail.
Cross the car park heading for a track leading past a red brick building comprising part of the cycle hire centre.
Follow the track as it runs straight ahead. You walk through a series of gates and down a pretty steep slope towards a bridge across the Bentley Brook.
Leaving Ashbourne behind you follow the Tissington Trail heading north towards the edge of the National Park.
After a couple of miles of steady walking you pass the small villages of Thorpe and Fenny Bentley. Here the former railway line runs between the two villages. You pass a small car park for the trail constructed upon the site of an old station and freight marshalling yard.
Beyond this point you are around a mile and a half from Tissington. You walk through a railway cutting lined with grasses and wildflowers in summer.
A little way after the cutting you cross the busy A515 linking Ashbourne with Buxton across the National Park.
This is near where you leave the Tissington Trail for the village of Tissington.
Look out on your left for a set of steps cut into the bank leading off the trail down to a stile out into a field.
Climb the stile and walk straight ahead across the field.
On the far side of the field you come to a gate leading out into a pasture which you cross.
This leads to a stone stile off to the right which leads into another pasture right on the edge of Tissington.
Cross the pasture heading to the right here there is a gate leading out onto a lane into the village.
Once in the lane turn right and walk a short distance towards the village green.
Here you are a short distance from the hall, church and the wells which are dressed each year.
Handily the bus stop from which there are frequent services between Ashbourne and Buxton is immediately adjacent to the green on the right.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Tissington is well served by buses (at the time of writing in June 2023) between Ashbourne and Buxton which run between early in the morning and just after half six in the evening. They are approximately hourly. From Buxton or Ashbourne it is possible to get buses to other locations (Buxton also has a station with trains running north towards Manchester). No other destinations are served by bus from Tissington apart from Ashbourne and Buxton and villages in between.