[1] About two miles (3 km) SSE of Bolsover, the village's main street is the B6417 road between Clowne and New Houghton, which connects at Scarcliffe to the A617 between Mansfield and Chesterfield.

Other nearby settlements include Clay Cross, Matlock, Shirebrook, Warsop, North Wingfield, Tupton, Pilsley and Ashover.

[3] In Palterton and Scarcliffe and "Tunstall" (in Ault Hucknall Lefnoth had six carucates of land and two bovates to the geld with l;and for eight ploughs.

[2] Both Scarcliffe[6] and Palterton [7] have its own primary school, which takes children between the ages of four and eleven and has some 80 places.

There are two pubs in Scarcliffe ('The Elm Tree' and 'The Horse and Groom') and the 'Palterton Miner's Welfare' in Palterton, but no shop in the hamlet or village.

It contains a handsome marble monument, dating to the 13th century, of a Lady Constantia, who holds a child in her arms.

A stone tympanum over an ancient door is carved with geometrical patterns, and there is a medieval piscina.

Scarcliffe now forms a united benefice with Ault Hucknall, Astwith, Bramley Vale, Doe Lea, Glapwell, Hardwick Hall, Stainsby, Rowthorne, and Hardstoft.

Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries the church was held by Darley Abbey, later becoming a vicarage in the gift of the Dukes of Devonshire, major landowners in the area.

The line through the station was brought to a premature demise in December 1951 by the deteriorating state of the 2,624-yard (2,399-metre) Bolsover Tunnel a short distance to the west.

The tunnel was mostly filled in with colliery waste in 1966-7 but the eastern (Scarcliffe) portal is still visible at the end of an unusually deep sheer-sided cutting.

The village is in a region which is underlaid by a large porous water-bearing rock structure called the Magnesian Limestone aquifer, which dips downwards to the east.