Park at the National Trust car park at the foot of the dale, which has around 220 spaces. It's £6 for up to 4 hours or £8 for longer, paid at the machine by card or coins, and number plate recognition is in use. National Trust members park free by scanning their membership card at the machine. The car park is open from dawn to dusk, there's no overnight parking, and minibuses and coaches aren't allowed. Public toilets, run by the Peak District National Park Authority, are by the kiosks. Check the latest prices here.

High on the dale side above the main path stands Reynard's Arch, a natural rock bridge about 6m high that was once part of a cave. Behind it is Reynard's Kitchen Cave, about 14m long and 5m wide at its mouth, narrowing to less than a metre at the back. People have used it on and off for some 10,000 years. A dig in 1959 found things from the Neolithic to the medieval period, some of which are now in Buxton Museum, and the cave walls carry carved 17th-century witch marks, meant to ward off evil spirits.

The 1959 dig missed the cave's real treasure. Decades later, a local climber sheltering from heavy rain had a small pin-pointer metal detector in his bag. He ran it over the ground beside him and found four coins. He reported them to Derbyshire's finds officer, who told the National Trust, and archaeologists from the Trust and University of Leicester Archaeological Services came to dig the cave with volunteers from Operation Nightingale. They worked by torchlight, breaking through a hard crust of calcite to reach the old cave floor. The find was announced in July 2014.

In all they recovered 26 coins. Twenty were Late Iron Age gold and silver coins of the Corieltavi, a farming tribe whose lands lay further east, between the Trent and the Nene, with centres at Leicester, Lincoln and Sleaford. Three were Roman coins struck before the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43. It was thought to be the first time coins of these two origins had been found buried together in a cave in Britain. The dig also turned up a decorated Roman brooch from around the middle of the 1st century AD.

Nobody knows why the coins were left here. Rachael Hall, the National Trust archaeologist on the dig, said they suggested a serious amount of wealth and power, as coins at the time were symbols of status more than everyday money. They may have been hidden for safekeeping, or the cave may have been a sacred place where valuables were protected. The coroner declared the hoard treasure, conservators at the British Museum and University College London cleaned the coins, and they were due to go on permanent display at Buxton Museum.

People have come to look at Dovedale for a long time. Gentry made up most of the visitors in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in Victorian times the writing of Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson and the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, who painted Ilam Rock, brought even more. Samuel Johnson and John Ruskin praised the dale too, and in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet talks with Mr Darcy about her travels in Derbyshire, Dove Dale among them.

The stepping stones below Thorpe Cloud were laid around 1890 for the growing crowds of Victorian visitors, and in those days you could hire a donkey to carry you further into the dale. The railway had reached Ashbourne in 1852, and when the Ashbourne to Buxton line opened in 1899, with a station named Thorpe Cloud above the village of Thorpe, walkers of every class could reach the dale for a day out. That line closed in the 1960s and is now the Tissington Trail. On one Sunday in August 1990, a count found 4,421 walkers on the Staffordshire side of the river and 3,597 on the Derbyshire side.

The stones themselves caused a row in 2010. The National Trust and Derbyshire County Council had all but one of them topped with mortar and flat limestone slabs, and many visitors were unhappy, feeling the old stones were part of the charm. The new tops also hid the fossils of crinoids, or sea lilies, that could once be seen in them. Whatever you think of the change, hopping across them is still a highlight of a day in Dovedale.