Bakewell

June 2018

One of Sheffield's selling factors is its proximity to the Peak District, and although this is best seen by car, buses do run some routes here. One weekend we decided to go to Bakewell, home of the famous tart by the same name (by which I mean food item).

The village is wonderfully quaint, featuring tearooms and cheese shops and all sorts of adorable places to pop into. (Yes, of course I bought a cheese wheel!) I was quite excited to discover that Jane Austen revised her book 'Pride and Prejudice' whilst staying in the town.

We were lucky enough to have picked a wonderfully sunny day, and decided to stroll by the river to work up an appetite for the packed sandwiches we had brought (taking a train with sandwiches had made me gleefully feel like I was in a Famous Five novel). 

The medieval five-arched stone bridge dating from the 1300s, was especially lovely to walk by.


The river Wye was also ridiculously pretty, and we wandered along it imagining who lived in those grand houses and how lovely it must be to have dinner overlooking the river, listening to it burble by.


You could tell summer was finally upon us, as we took welcome respite in the shade of the trees. Of course, we had to picnic by the river!

Sandwiches eaten, we started on the real reason we were there, Bakewell tarts! The story (largely unfounded but who knows) goes that in 1820 the landlady of the local inn left her cook instructions to make a jam tart with an egg almond base. 

However the foolish cook instead spread the eggs and almond paste on top of the jam instead of putting them in the pastry, and thus the Bakewell tart was born! It was rather tasty, though quite crumbly. 

Bakewell had a timelessness to it, which made me feel like I could return in 30 years, and nothing would have changed. That sense is after all, one of my favourite things about England.