The Peakside Journal is written from a stone terrace above the river Wye, a short walk from the market square in Bakewell. It started as a small running set of notes for guests in the cottage downstairs — which walks were worth doing in which season, which bakery did the best loaf on a Saturday, why the woodburner needed lighting an hour before dinner — and grew from there into a slow magazine for anyone planning a Peak District holiday.
We cover four things, more or less: walks and guides in the Peak District, what makes a good holiday cottage in this part of the country, the practicalities of family and group stays, and the small pleasures of a slow Derbyshire week. The pieces are written by a small group of contributors who all spend serious time in this corner of the country, and edited from Bakewell.
What We Don’t Do
We don’t review every cottage in the Peaks. We don’t run sponsored content. We don’t try to compete with the bigger travel sites for the comprehensive guide to the National Park. There are good comprehensive guides out there already; we are not one of them.
What we try to do instead is the smaller, more specific writing — the kind of piece you would write to a friend who was thinking of booking a week in October. The unglamorous practical stuff. The honest opinions about which great house to do first. The recurring questions our readers send us about cottages, walks, weather and food.
Who Writes It
A small set of contributors, most of them based in or just outside Bakewell, most of them working in or around the local hospitality and walking world in their day-to-day. We rotate the bylines and try to vary the voice across the pieces, but the editorial decisions all happen in one kitchen in one cottage on one Derbyshire lane.
If you have something you’d like to write about — a walk we haven’t covered, a cottage you stayed in and felt strongly about, a small Derbyshire food we’ve missed — please get in touch. We’re always interested in honest writing from people who actually know the place.