History
The village was part of the ancient hundred of Scarsdale. 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 13th century resident Lady Constantia (whose monument is in the church) left 5 acres (20,000 m2) of land to provide for the ringing of the church's curfew bell for three weeks on either side of Christmas in perpetuity. After some eight hundred years, the 'Bellrope Charity' continues to serve its founder's purpose.
The surviving parish registers date from 1680.
The village school was built in 1868-1869. It was established opposite the former Primitive Methodist church, which had been founded in 1858 but is now gone.
John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870-1872) says:
SCARCLIFF, a parish, with a village, in the district of Mansfield and county of Derby; 6 miles (9.7 km) N N W of Mansfield r. station. Post-town, Mansfield. Acres, 3,674. Real property, £3,790. Pop., 548. Houses, 126. The property is divided among a few. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lichfield. Value, £70. Patron, Earl Bathurst. The church is ancient but good, and has a tower of 1842. There are an endowed school, and charities £30.Scarcliffe once had a station on the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway (later part of the Great Central Railway and subsequently the LNER), opened in March 1897, but this section 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. Also at Palterton in the parish, there was a station called "Palterton & Sutton" on the "Doe Lea Valley Line" from Staveley to Pleasley, belonging to the Midland Railway, later part of the LMS, which was opened in September 1890 and closed to passengers in September 1930.
In the early 20th century, the main landowner was the 7th Earl Bathurst.
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