Chapel-en-le-Frith, also known as the Chapel in the Forest, earns its name from a period during the thirteenth century when a chapel was built here by the keepers of the Royal Forest, and it is at about this time that the beginnings of a settlement here was being built.

This charmingly set village has a number of relics dating from early times, but not all of them are associated with social calm. When 1,500 Scottish prisoners were taken at the battle of Ribbleton Moor, not far from Preston in Lancashire, they were incarcerated within Chapel’s church for sixteen days.

By the time that the doors were reopened, forty-four of those prisoners had died and were buried in the churchyard.

Chapel’s Market Place has one of very few remaining sets of wooden stocks in Derbyshire, and if any wrong doer was to break even the simplest of the village’s laws at the time, the punishment would have been abuse by the locals, or perhaps a whipping if the offence demanded it.

The scenery around Chapel is largely unspoilt and quite beautiful, and although not a tourist attraction in the true sense, Chapel offers good walking country it being surrounded on all sides by a ring of hills, with Eccles Pike at 1,213ft towards the north-west, Combs Moss at 1,454ft to the south, Brown Knoll at 1,866ft to the north-east and Ladder Hill at 1,329ft to the west.

It can be seen that these can offer the walker many superb vantage points to see the whole of Chapel and the surrounding countryside from on high.