Bakewell

Bakewell is the only town within the boundaries of the Peak District National Park — a designation that gives it an administrative uniqueness within the landscape it inhabits. It sits in the valley of the River Wye, surrounded by limestone hills, its centre a compact arrangement of limestone buildings around a market square and a medieval bridge that has been crossing the Wye in some form since the thirteenth century. The Monday market has been running since the town's charter in 1330. The pudding — a Bakewell Pudding, not a Bakewell Tart, a distinction the town's bakeries maintain with some feeling — was created here, allegedly by accident, in the nineteenth century.

It is an unusually self-possessed place. The tourists come in summer for the puddings and the bridge and the proximity to Chatsworth; the town gets on with its market and its Monday routines around them. In winter, when the coaches stop running, Bakewell reverts to something closer to its actual character: a working market centre for the farming communities of the Wye valley, the kind of town that has been serving the same practical function for seven hundred years and sees no particular reason to stop.

Within the Book of Thoth Saga, Bakewell occupies a position that makes productive use of its domestic familiarity. It is one of England's most ordinarily named places — the word Bakewell carries an almost comic wholesomeness, an association with jam and almonds and afternoon tea — which is precisely why its appearance as the third point in a supernatural coin pattern is one of the saga's quieter unsettling gestures. The pattern does not care about the puddings.

Bakewell's atmosphere is that of a town that knows it is picturesque and has made its peace with that knowledge. The limestone buildings catch the afternoon light well. The river ducks under the medieval bridge in a way that has appeared in paintings. The surrounding hills are the rolling, pastoral White Peak rather than the austere Dark Peak moorland that dominates the north — greener, gentler, more immediately legible as beautiful. Bakewell is, by the standards of Derbyshire settings, a comfortable place. This is part of what makes its entry into the saga's more unsettling register significant.

The saga deploys Bakewell's domestic character as a deliberate contrast. The Mammon coin pattern is not choosing its locations for their atmosphere or their history. It is choosing them by geometry — by their position within forty miles of Hope's End, their arrangement in a tightening spiral. That this spiral passes through a town where the most famous local product is a pastry is not ironic in any way the town would recognise. Bakewell simply appears in the pattern the way it appears on the Monday market stall: self-contained, unremarkable, going about its business while something else is going about its entirely different business nearby.