Welcome to my Old Roads of Derbyshire website and blog!

You can sample my book on the history of roads, travel and travellers in Derbyshire, then browse through over a hundred posts on these and related subjects. There are posts on everything from prehistoric burial sites beside ancient routes, to the twentieth-century ramblers who helped preserve ancient footpaths. Enjoy exploring my website and the paths of Derbyshire!

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The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Derbyshire has a wealth of old roads, lanes, tracks, hollow ways and paths, some dating back thousands of years. It is a network which links a fascinating variety of sometimes enigmatic monuments, from fortified hilltops and stone circles to ruined abbeys and hermitages, ancient churches and tumuli.

The Old Roads of Derbyshire traces the development of these roads, from prehistoric ridgeways, Roman ‘streets’ and medieval pilgrimage routes to the growth of the turnpikes, and finally to leisure use by cyclists and hikers. Travellers of all kind are included: ‘jaggers’ with their packhorse trains, pilgrims, drovers, pedlars and tramps, and passengers in stage coaches and wagons, as well as the essential infrastructure of bridges and inns.

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Latest blog post

• Pedalling to freedomSeptember 14, 2026

  

  ‘Escape to the country’ has become a cliche; an empty phrase at a time when the countryside has become increasingly suburban. But a century ago, before mass car ownership, leaving the city was more difficult, dependent on bus, train or bike. Yet factory workers then probably had more incentive to escape, at least for a few hours, the smells and noise of the workplace. Alan Sillitoe, the Nottingham-born author, started work in the Raleigh factory there at the age of 14, and took advantage of owning his first bike to cycle out of the city on the route of the A610, (although the modern dual-carriageway was years in the future):

  Beyond Eastwood Hilltop, one free-wheeled down to the Erewash, which was followed by a sure push-up to Codnor and Ripley, and many another walk with the bicycle before coming into Matlock.

  

  Sillitoe says that he often cycled alone, occasionally with friends. These trips would have been made during the last war, though he was then too young to be called up:

  I’d go on Easter weekends through Bakewell and Buxton and Chapel-en-le-Frith, and back to Nottingham via Chesterfield and Clay Cross, sleeping in fields or barns by the roadside, or under the lee of those rough stone walls marking off the fields, thinking the hills beautiful and restful, but in no way hating the small hilltop mining towns and settlements when I got back among them.

  

  Like many young cyclists and ramblers from the nearby cities, for Sillitoe Derbyshire meant a complete break from everyday life:

  … at Easter the road was often wet, and the wind could be bitter enough, but the real impulse was to wear out the body after a week in a factory, and reach as far a point from Nottingham as a bicycle could go in one weekend. The marathon run on a single day was to cycle the twenty-five miles to Matlock, climb the Heights of Abraham of several hundred feet, visit the ancient lead workings of the Rutland Cavern, row on the slate-grey Derwent for an hour and get as near as one dare to the weir without going over it or be rescued by an irate boatman, then cycle back to Nottingham before darkness set in – usually on a bottle of milk or lemonade and a packet of sandwiches.

  

  Sillitoe went on from Raleigh to a remarkable career as an author; a rare example of a genuine working-class writer. He subsequently lived in France and Spain after being pensioned off by the RAF, which gave him the freedom to develop his first, brilliant novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. There are many parallels between Sillitoe and DH Lawrence: Eastwood is only a few miles from Radford, both had TB, both lived abroad, and both wrote classic ‘coming of age’ stories.

  Source: Lawrence and the Real England, Staple Special (1985) pp 8-11