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The village may have been a Roman settlement, perhaps based on lead mining, but there is currently no archaeological evidence to prove this. A nineteenth-century bath house over a hot spring is known locally as The Roman Baths but this was built in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a spa resort. (After the Stoney Middleton Youth Club cleared undergrowth in the early 1980s the building was consolidated and made secure by local craftsmen with the aid of a grant by the Peak Park.)
A semi-circular earth platform called "Castle Hill" overlooks the village; academic opinion varies as to what this earthwork originally. It may have been a ringwork castle, or simply the foundations of a summer house. The origins of the name of the village go back to the Saxo-Norman period when it was known as Middletone or Middletune, the name Stoney Middleton literally meaning 'stony middle farm'.
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