September 2022 – The Old Roads of Derbyshire

When I was a child we were occasionally driven into Derbyshire as a holiday treat, and coming down the Via Gellia was one highlight of such trips. It seemed a very romantic route, winding and well-wooded within the steep-sided valley, with mysterious caves inviting exploration. Today the road seems a little less fascinating, more overgrown with trees, and with massive quarry trucks weaving round every bend, yet it is of historical interest in that we know (unusually) when and why it was built, and by whom.

The Via Gellia is not the only road in Derbyshire to be named after a person; for instance there is the Sir William Hill near Eyam, but it must be a unique case of a Latinized family name! The Gell family had lived at Hopton Hall for generations, near where they had profitable quarries and lead mines. Philip Eyre Gell (1723-95) inherited the estate at the age of 16, but postponed marriage till he was 50, in 1773, when he married the 16-year-old Dorothy Milnes. Their first son, another Philip, was born in 1775.

Burdett’s map of 1791 shows a track from Cromford to the mill where the Bonsall Brook drops down the Clatterway, but nothing beyond that point. The building of the Via Gellia is generally dated to 1791/2, and was designed to allow carts of lead ore or stone to travel down from the Hopton area to the canal and lead smelters at Cromford. Nobody knows who gave it its name, but one possibility is Philip Gell’s second son Wiliam, an archaeologist who had visited the ruins of Pompeii. Perhaps his interest in Roman civilization and knowledge of Roman road names such as the Via Appia led him to christen his father’s road in Roman style, hinting at an improbable family history dating back over a thousand years?

Tufa Cottage, situated about half-way down the route, must have been built by the mid-nineteenth century, originally for a gamekeeper on the Gell estate. Tufa is a kind of porous limestone found locally, with a distinctive coarse texture. Today it is notable for the cable car in the front garden!

*Wright: Arkwright’s Mill in the late eighteenth century*

Paintings and prints can help us understand the development of the road system, and reveal historical features not shown on maps. As Matlock Bath became an established tourist attraction in the late 1700s, visitors were also keen to visit Arkwright’s mill just up the road at Cromford, and be impressed by the scale of the buildings. One of these ‘industrial tourists’ was Joseph Wright of Derby, who painted the mill both by day and at night, when the rows of candlelit windows must have been a remarkable sight in this very rural location. The painting above appears to have been made from a location close to the modern High Tor cafe by the Cromford crossroads, looking down the road towards Cromford Bridge. But this area has been radically changed by cutting through the Scarthin Rock, a process begun in 1817 but not finally completed in modern form until 1962. The painting clearly shows the mill leat on the far side of the road, which led to the aqueduct above the road (damaged quite recently and sadly never replaced). The Bonsall Brook is shown on the nearside of the road (not visible today), and the main building is taller than today’s mill. In the distance the tower of Crich Stand can be clearly seen, which at the time of the painting had been recently (1785) rebuilt in stone by Francis Hurt, a major local landowner.

*Wright: Willersley Castle and Cromford Church*

Another view of the area has the Matlock Bath road in the foreground, and is framed again by Scarthin Rock. It is difficult to find this viewpoint today due to the increase in tree cover: in Wright’s time the valley was quite bare. Both Cromford church and Willersley Castle must have been very recent when this was painted; in fact the church was not finished until 1797, the year of Wright’s death. The painting illustrates the first appearance of the church; the current porch was added in the mid-nineteenth century. Next to the bridge the small fishing house is clearly visible.

The third painting is an example of Wright’s interest in dramatically-lit night scenes. Although the view is from a similar spot to the first picture, the road now runs to the left of the mill, not the right. It must be assumed that this is artistic licence, since the road in the first picture is so clearly on the line of the present one. Clearly, the details of such pictures cannot be assumed to be reliable, but it’s worth noting that the two-storey building in the foreground, which is not shown in the first view, survives today in the same form.

The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Month: September 2022

Gell the Roman?

Mr Wright paints Cromford