St John the Baptist church

St John the Baptist’s Church stands in Bamford, a village in the Hope Valley of Derbyshire’s Peak District. The present building dates from 1860, when William Butterfield restored the church and added a bell tower. In October 1860 the Bishop of Lichfield consecrated the new church on the same site. It shares its parish with the nearby church of St Michael and All Angels in Hathersage. The church’s pipe organ was built by Albert Keates of Sheffield and enlarged in 1958 by T.C. Wilcock, also of Sheffield. The tower contains six ringable bells, cast in 1998 by John Taylor & Co to mark the Millennium. The treble weighs 94.4 kg and the tenor 215.2 kg; both have modern metal stays instead of wooden ones. Bellringers practise every Wednesday evening in the tower. The churchyard holds graves moved from Derwent village after Ladybower Dam flooded it during the Second World War. A separate grave remembers workers who died building the Derwent and Howden dams in 1902, while a Holocaust memorial honours victims of that tragedy. War graves in the churchyard include two soldiers from the First World War, a member of Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps and an airman from the Royal Air Force. The graveyard also contains a memorial to the village of Birchinlee, known locally as Tin Town. The church sits opposite St John’s Close on Main Road in Bamford. Its quiet setting overlooks the Hope Valley and the surrounding moorland.