Why Is It Called the Peak District?
Anyone who comes to the Peak District expecting peaks goes home a bit puzzled. There are hardly any. The highest ground, Kinder Scout, is a flat bog 636 metres up, and most of the rest is rounded hills, high plateaus and deep valleys. The name isn’t a description of the skyline. It is an old name for a whole stretch of hill country, older than England, and for the people who took their name from it. This is a guide to where it came from: the Peak-dwellers, the kings who absorbed them, the castle and the hunting forest named after the land, the demon who may be hiding in the word, and the writers who made “the Peak” famous. For the land itself, see the geography of the Dark Peak.
What does “Peak” actually mean?
The modern word “peak”, meaning a pointed summit, has nothing to do with it. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, following the New English Dictionary, called any connection between the two “unwarranted”, because the district’s name turns up long before the summit meaning existed. The old form is Péaclond, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for 924, which Wikipedia glosses as Old English for “hill country”. So “the Peak” originally meant something closer to “the hills”: a whole upland region, not a point on it.
For a long time that is all it was called: Peakland, or simply the Peak. From the Renaissance , Thomas Hobbes, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys and Charles Cotton all wrote about “the Peak”. The “District” is the modern part.
The Peak-dwellers: the Pecsæte
The people the name belongs to were the Pêcsætan, or Pecsæte, literally “Peak-dwellers”. They were Angles, part of the wave of West Angles who pushed up the valleys of the Derwent and the Dove in the 6th century, into the southern edge of what had been Brigantia, the territory of the Brythonic Brigantes. They settled the central and northern Peak, and later English writers called them Peaklanders, or Peakrills.
Their one appearance in a document is a single line in the Tribal Hidage, a list of thirty-five peoples of Anglo-Saxon England and how much land each was assessed at, compiled some time between the 7th and 9th centuries (it survives only in an 11th-century copy). The Pecsætna are down for 1,200 hides, against 30,000 for Mercia itself. The list never says how its figures were arrived at, but the line shows the Peak-dwellers were real, counted and worth assessing. By the 8th century they had been swallowed by Mercia, the great Midland kingdom, and their territory became its northern division.
What they left behind is mostly in the ground. On 3 May 1848 the antiquarian Thomas Bateman opened a barrow at Benty Grange, beside a major Roman road, and found a 7th-century warrior’s helmet with a boar standing on its crown, a pagan symbol of protection, and a silver cross on the nose-guard facing it. Rich burials like Benty Grange have led to the suggestion that the Pecsæte had their own ruling family before Mercia took over, but nothing written survives to say so. The helmet is in Weston Park Museum in Sheffield, which bought it from Bateman’s estate in 1893.
Before them: forts, lead and the Romans
The Angles weren’t the first in the Peak. People have been here since the Mesolithic, leaving flints in the caves of Dovedale. The Bronze Age left Arbor Low and the Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor, and hillforts like the one on Mam Tor. The Romans came for the lead. Around 80 CE they built a timber fort at Brough-on-Noe called Navio (“on the river”), rebuilt it in stone in 154 CE, and kept it going until about 350, guarding a knot of roads, among them Batham Gate, which ran through the lead country between Templeborough and Buxton. Buxton was settled around 78 CE as Aquae Arnemetiae, “the spa of the goddess of the grove”. The English renamed Navio after what it was, a burh, a fort, and so the village is Brough.
Peakland: a king’s fort at Bakewell
The name was being written down in the age of Alfred’s children. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Edward the Elder, Alfred’s son, “went to Bakewell in Peakland” and ordered a fort built as near to it as possible, and manned. Sources date it to both 920 and 924. Where exactly that burh stood is still argued over: the motte on Castle Hill at Bakewell turned out on excavation to be 12th-century, and it may or may not sit on Edward’s earlier work. The Chronicle’s spelling of Peakland is Péaclond.
The Normans: the Castle of the Peak and the king’s forest
After 1066 the Peak went to William Peverel, a follower of William the Conqueror, who built a castle on a hill above Castleton overlooking the Hope Valley. It is in Domesday Book in 1086, one of 48 castles in the survey and the only one in Derbyshire, and it went by Peak Castle as well as Peveril. Henry II took it into royal hands, and the stone keep was probably begun around 1176: the Pipe Rolls record £184 spent on it between 1175 and 1177.
The castle ran the Forest of High Peak, a royal hunting ground over much of north-west Derbyshire, bounded by the Goyt, the Wye, the Derwent and the Etherow and covering about a hundred square miles in 1305. Records from the forest mention deer, wild pigs, wolves, horses and sheep, and anyone who broke forest law was brought to the castle at Castleton to answer for it. The village of Peak Forest still carries the name. It was once called Chamber of Campana, and Chamber Farm nearby may have been where the forest officials met.
Is there a demon in the name?
Domesday places the castle at Pechesers, which has been translated both as “Peak’s Tail” and as “Peak’s Arse”, after the great cave under the hill at Castleton. That cave, now Peak Cavern, has the largest natural cave entrance in Britain, and it was long called the Devil’s Arse. William Camden used the name in his Britannia in 1586. One story says it was renamed so as not to offend Queen Victoria on a visit in 1842, though the Queen later said she never went in. The name has since come back: the cave is marketed as the Devil’s Arse again. Until 1915, families lived in houses built inside the cave mouth and made rope for a living.
Here is where the name gets interesting. The 1911 Britannica notes the cave’s old name as Péac’s Arse, and adds: “Péac, it has been suggested, is the name of a local deity or demon, and possibly may be identified with Puck.” If that is right, the Peak isn’t named for its hills at all but for something that lived under them, and the Devil’s Arse is the same name as Peak’s Arse, with the devil standing in for the old god. It is a suggestion, not a settled fact, and the “hill country” reading is the mainstream one. But it is the kind of suggestion that, once you’ve heard it, you can’t quite unhear.
The Seven Wonders of the Peak
The name went national thanks to a philosopher. Thomas Hobbes, tutor and secretary to the Cavendish earls of Devonshire, toured the High Peak in 1626 and in 1636 published De Mirabilibus Pecci, an 84-page Latin poem on its seven wonders, summed up in its English translation as “Two fonts, two caves. One pallace, mount and pit.” The fonts are St Ann’s Well in Buxton and the Ebbing and Flowing Well at Tideswell. The caves are Poole’s Cavern and the Devil’s Arse. The palace is Chatsworth, the mount is Mam Tor and the pit is Eldon Hole. Charles Cotton, squire of Beresford Hall in Dovedale, followed in 1681 with The Wonders of the Peake, and tourists started following the list round. Not everyone was impressed. Daniel Defoe went in the 1720s and decided only Eldon Hole and Chatsworth deserved the title, and called the moors near Chatsworth “a waste and houling wilderness”. Real numbers of visitors had to wait for the railway, which reached Buxton in 1863.
The Peakrills got their own mention in Defoe, too: hardy lead miners, so good underground that engineers took them on to dig siege tunnels.
From the Peak to the Peak District
The “District” is the last layer. On 17 April 1951 the Peak District National Park was designated, the first national park in the UK, partly on the back of the right-to-roam campaign that came to a head with the Kinder Scout trespass of 1932. Today the area splits into the Dark Peak of gritstone moor in the north, west and east and the White Peak of limestone in the middle and south. Neither of them, much, has peaks.
From the Peak to The Dark Peak
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, takes its wilderness from the northern half of all this and calls it The Dark Peak, with its own Dark Peak District Council. A land named for a people who left almost nothing written, with a possible demon under its main hill and a cave called the Devil’s Arse, needed very little pushing. The bestiary’s nearest relation to a spirit like Péac is the boggart, and the rest of the landscape’s legends are in the Peak District folklore guide. If you want to go out there yourself, Foked is a free solo RPG set on that ground. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the 924 “Peaclond”, “hill country”, early writers, prehistory, Buxton, Defoe’s “houling wilderness”, the railway and the national park from Wikipedia; the “unwarranted” link to “peak”, Péac’s Arse and Puck from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica; the Pecsæte, Peakrills and Defoe’s miners from Wikipedia; the Tribal Hidage from Wikipedia and its hide figures from a transcription of the list; the helmet from Wikipedia; Navio from Wikipedia; Edward the Elder at Bakewell from Wikipedia and the Gatehouse gazetteer; Peveril Castle and Pechesers from Wikipedia; the royal forest from Wikipedia; the Devil’s Arse from Wikipedia; the Seven Wonders from Wikipedia and Hobbes’s work for the Cavendishes from Wikipedia.
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