The Millstone Country Inn at Hathersage hasn’t seen me propping up the bar for over a quarter of a century and like many of the pubs in the Derbyshire Peak District until recently it hadn’t changed much in those 25+ years. That changed two years ago when it passed to new ownership, that of the new licensee, Noreen. Since taking over she’s been slowly upgrading both the bar area and accommodation, walking that line between bringing it up to a spec that is demanded by today’s traveller and keeping the traditional feel of a long-established and no-nonsense Derbyshire Inn.
To allow ourselves time to speak to Noreen we first visited a week ago, at the end of their carvery service on Sunday. We then returned this week to take a few pictures while the place was busier to sample the atmosphere. Despite the snow and treacherous road conditions outside the restaurant was busy, some pre-booked groups and some walkers turning up on-spec.
The carvery model of eating is very popular, especially with the outdoor types at The Millstone Country Inn because they serve good honest food and lots of it at a reasonable price. The friendly staff even offering extra helpings to the seated diners after they had made a dent in the food they’d already selected from the self-service carvery.
We didn’t sample the carvery today but did so last week and found it to be varied and filling with no skimping on the amount of meat (or meats if you wish) served by the carvery server. The vegetables etc are self-service so you can take as much or as little as you like and judging by the piled-high plates today the cold weather had given the hikers in the place a healthy appetite.
The carvery is only available on a Sunday with pub grub and sandwiches available to bar clientele the rest of the week. The menu at time of publication can be found here.
As you’ve gathered the whole place is hiker and dog friendly, that includes the guest rooms. Like the rest of The Millstone Country Inn Noreen has updated and redecorated the guest accommodation. The two rooms we saw were clean, nicely presented and characterful in their layout as you’d expect from an old building, each one being unique and named accordingly. The “Burbage” room (pictured) has a nice dual aspect over the valley below The Millstone Country Inn. You can view the rest of the rooms on the Millstone Country Inn’s website. As you’ll see each room is locally named rather than numbered. Flat screen TVs hang on the wall often alongside traditional looking furniture rather than the standard modern designs you tend to find in the rooms of chain hotels. And no ancient highly patterned bedspreads of dubious history, here the bed linen looks nice, crisp and contemporary.
Here’s a top tip, if you want to know how many of the customers in a bar are regulars these days log in to the free WiFi when it’s quite and see how much the speed of your connection slows down at the place fills up. In the case of The Millstone Country Inn it was evident that many of those there today were return customers updating their Facebook with images of the snow outside judging by the drop in speed LOL.
We found the staff at the Millstone Inn to be universally friendly and personable, attentive but not overly so. We didn’t stop overnight in the rooms but the standard of housekeeping seemed good with the rooms immaculately presented and fresh.
What’s New at The Millstone Country Inn
In the week between our two visits new seating had appeared and new wall art depicted historic local scenes adorned the freshly painted walls. If you haven’t been to The Millstone Country Inn at Hathersage recently you might want to pop in and see what’s new.
Disclosure – During the course of this review we were provided with a one course meal and hot drink free of charge, Click here for more information about reviews
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