A very nice one, mind …

The Peaks are like a great big green lung thing in the middle of a ring of Midlands and Northern cities. But because it’s such an important leisure area, rural Derbyshire is developed in a way that little of the rest of England’s countryside is.

This has its advantages if you quite like going for a walk, but are not into that shorts and backpack and stout boots thing. A lot of the paths are proper tarmacked jobs, like little roads. This is a real mercy since the land is really very, very lumpy, with a lot of uphill bits to slog up. Which is probably why they call it the Peak District.

It would appear that the only people who go to the Peak District on holiday go there for the walking. Furthermore, the walkers are either all over the age of 60, or they are lesbians, or both (do the Venn diagram yourself).

In between the walking, you can pay money to visit various holes in the ground, such as at the Heights of Abraham, which is perilously close to ripoffsville, adults paying seven quid for a ride up in a cable car (brilliant!!) and a lot of traipsing around former mines (not brilliant). Or there’s the famous Blue John cavern at Castleton which is also expensive, but more interesting and beautiful, though only if you kinda like geology.

‘Course Up North is supposed to be a bit more democratic, folks are a lot more neighbourly than they are in the endless faceless suburban hell of the south east, but one wonders for how much longer.

See, if you have the money, work in Sheffield, Brum, Manchester or thereabouts and want to spend 2.5 hours per working day sitting at the wheel of your VW Toerag, you can buy the dream. Get yourself a little rose-covered cottage or substantial Victorian rectory in a National Park. Nice. But unlike a lot of those picture postcard villages in the Cotswolds where the working classes have long since been driven out, you still need a working class to do the work.

Consequently, the towns and villages are similar in the sense that there’s an old centre of quaint cottages with undulating roofs, and around the edges there are ranks of terraced houses, built sympathetically in the local stone, all with satellite dishes on the wall. It’s only a matter of time before these, too, will be sold off to middle class incomers.

Though if forced to live here myself, I’ve have one of those elegant Victorian villas around the edge of the park in Buxton. This, regrettably, is not going to happen as due to an ancient family joke, I cannot pronounce the town’s name properly and always refer to it as ‘Buttocks’. This is puerile and offensive and I apologise unreservedly to the good people of Buxton, who live in a very pleasant town which produces some very nice mineral water and where everything is lovely, unless you count the time when my old pal Mitch was nearly beaten up by a man in dress there, though that was back in the eighties.

And who, frinstance, wouldn’t want to live in a village like Eyam, where we spent a week? Only an utter turnip-head can fail to be fascinated by the story of the plague village.

In case you don’t know it: In 1665, as the plague was slaughtering thousands of Londoners, it arrived in Eyam, probably via a consignment of infected cloth. The village priesteen, a man named Mompesson, organised it so’s the place cut itself off from the rest of the country. Neighbouring communities and the local big-shot, the Duke of Devonshire, organised drops of food and other vitals at the edge of the village. Something between a quarter and a third of the population of Eyam is thought to have died over 1665-66, but the plague did not spread.

It’s a wonderful story, gilded by some beautiful details and complexities. Mompesson, for instance, was a proper-job Anglican, but he couldn’t have managed without the help of a previous incumbent, a man named Stanley. Stanley was older and a hardline nonconformist who’d probably been kicked out of the job by Charles II’s Act of Uniformity, one of those pragmatic, even cynical, religious compromises that make up the history of the Church of England.

Eyam reverences its history, but it fetishises it as well. The wrought-iron gates of the village school represent children playing ring a ring a roses (which of course originated during one or other plague). Some people might find the idea of children dying of plague (or anything else) sort of disturbing.

There are plaques all over the village in gardens and on walls marking the known places where various plague casualties died but probably the best thing is a display in the village church telling the whole story. It includes part of a desperately poignant letter written by Mompesson to his children telling them how their mother had died of plague - she had insisted on staying at his side and helping him nurse the sick - and what an excellent, loving Christian woman she had been.

Catherine Mompesson’s tomb is in the churchyard. Each year, the wife of the present vicar lays a wreath on it.