The “Tan Hill” inn stands on the summit of Stainmoor, at a height of 1,727 feet above sea-level, and it is one of the most abject, uncompromisingly ugly buildings that ever builder built. The ruins of a toll-house stand near by, silently witnessing that it was once worth the while of somebody to levy and collect tolls on what is now as unfrequented a place as it is possible to conceive; but railways long since knocked the bottom out of that, and for some years, until the autumn of 1903, the licence of the inn itself was allowed to lapse, the house being first established for sake of the likely custom from a coal-pit in a neighbouring valley, now abandoned. The innkeeper lives rent free, with the half of his licence paid on condition of his looking after that now deserted mine. But there is one day in the whole year when the “Tan Hill” inn wakes to life and business. That is the day of Brough Horse Fair, and the traffic then is considerable: the only vestige of the former business of the road now left to it by the Bowes and Barras Railway. [Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR BUXTON.] Between Macclesfield and Buxton--five miles from Buxton and seven from Macclesfield--just, by about 1,500 yards--in Cheshire, although commonly said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers brought in waggonettes and brakes named after advertising generals and other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently until the time for returning happily comes round. There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here. Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a violin!