Peak Forest is a small village and civil parish on the main road the (A623) from Chapel-en-le-Frith to Chesterfield in Derbyshire.

[1] The village grew from the earlier settlement of Dam (still inhabited, with a number of houses and farms) at the conjunction of Perrydale and Damdale.

Until an Act of Parliament was passed in 1754 its minister was able to perform marriages without the need for reading the banns, and the village was known as the Gretna Green of Derbyshire.

[5] The Peak Forest Canal, although originally aiming for the limestone quarries in Great Rocks Dale just to the south of the village, never reached nearer than Buxworth, seven miles away, where it terminates at Bugsworth Basin.

The original limestone-carrying purpose of the canal was replaced long ago by the Great Rocks mineral railway line serving the quarries around Buxton and joining the Manchester–Sheffield line, via the diverging Chapel Milton Viaduct over the Black Brook valley at Chapel Milton (between Chapel-en-le-Frith and Chinley).