Find a basket you’ll keep for life

The story behind Peak Sales

Peak Sales began the way most good things in Derbyshire do — slowly, and outdoors. We started selling handwoven willow baskets on market stalls across the Peak District, and we still do. Standing behind a stall in Bakewell or Matlock in the rain teaches you quickly which products people actually want to carry home, and which ones only look good in a photograph.

Willow basketmaking is one of the oldest crafts in Britain, and one of the few that has never really been improved on. A well-made basket is woven around a solid base, worked while the willow is still supple, and finished with a border that locks the whole thing together without a single nail or screw. Done properly, it will outlast almost anything you could buy in plastic — and when it finally does give up, it goes back into the ground rather than sitting in landfill for four hundred years.

What we sell, and why

Our range has grown out of what customers kept asking for. Log baskets and hearth baskets for people with a real fire to feed. Garden trugs for cutting flowers and lifting vegetables. Shopping and storage baskets for anyone who has given up on carrier bags. Gift hampers built around Derbyshire producers, put together to be opened rather than photographed. Everything is chosen on the same basis: it has to be genuinely useful, and it has to be made well enough that you are not replacing it next year.

The Peak District runs through all of it. The landscape here is all drystone walls, hedgerows and worked woodland — things built by hand to last, out of whatever the land offered. That is the same instinct behind a good basket, and it is why our colours and shapes tend towards the muted and the practical rather than the fashionable.

Buying from us

You can order anything on this site for delivery anywhere in the UK, or you can come and find us in person — we are at markets across Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire throughout the year, and the dates are listed above. Buying at a stall has the obvious advantage that you can pick a basket up, feel the weight of it, and check it suits what you had in mind.

If you are not sure which size or style you need, or you want something put together as a gift, just ask. We would rather spend five minutes helping you choose the right thing than take a return three weeks later.