Peak District 360° Eyam

Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, England. The village is best known for being the "plague village" that chose to isolate itself when the Black Death was found in the village in August 1665, rather than see the infection travel further north. The village was founded and named by Anglo-saxons, and was mined for lead by the Romans.

The plague had been brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth that was delivered to tailor George Vicars from London.

Within a week he was dead. After the initial deaths, the townspeople turned to their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson and the Puritan Minister Thomas Stanley. They introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1665. These included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and the relocation of church services from the parish church of St. Laurence to Cucklett Delph to allow villagers to separate themselves, reducing the risk of infection. Perhaps, the best known decision was to quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease. The plague raged in the village for 16 months and killed at least 260 villagers: only 83 villagers survived out of a population of 350.

When the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found that fewer than a quarter of the village had survived the plague. Survival appeared random, as many plague survivors had close contact with the bacterium, but never caught the disease. For example, Elizabeth Hancock never became ill, despite burying six children and her husband in eight days (the graves are known as the Riley graves). The unofficial village grave digger also survived, despite handling many infected bodies.

Places of interest
Eyam can boast various plague related places of interest such as the 'boundary stone', a stone in which money was placed in exchange for food and medicine, and the Riley graves as mentioned above. The only pub to be found in the village is 'The Miners Arms'.

Well dressing is a custom practised in rural England in which wells, springs or other water sources are decorated with designs created from flower petals. The custom is most closely associated with the Peak District area. Read more about Well dressing.

Well Dressing events calendar