Month: March 2023

On yer bikes!

On By SteveIn Road users1 Comment

A group of Ripley cyclists about 1914

Bicycles only became practical transport in the 1890s, with the arrival of the chain-driven ‘safety cycle’ fitted with pneumatic tyres. Priced at about £12, for the first time they brought leisure travel within reach of the skilled working man or women – playing a significant role in female emancipation. Pioneering cyclists organised cycling clubs for weekend excursions, partly due to the state of the roads at that time, which caused frequent punctures. In the north the left-wing Clarion movement – strongest in Sheffield – organised a cycling association which held its first meeting at Ashbourne in 1895. Open to both sexes (unlike others) they saw their outings as an opportunity to spread socialist tracts around the countryside. Still in existence, the Clarion Cycling Club has (sadly) now dropped socialism from its masthead.

In the Edwardian period writers such as Thomas Hardy, HG Wells and DH Lawrence wrote of the pleasure and independence of cycling, which must have been greater at a time when cars were rarely seen. But a more recent writer has recorded his love of cycling from Nottingham into the Peak District. Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) wrote that he first bought a bicycle at the age of 14, and headed for Matlock via Eastwood (before the modern A610 was built). He free-wheeled down to the Erewash and then pushed the bike up part of the hill to Codnor, ‘and many another walk with the bicycle before coming into Matlock’. Clearly his bike was lacking the gears that today’s cyclists take for granted!

Alan Sillitoe, author of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

Sillitoe writes: ‘I’d go on Easter weekends through Bakewell and Buxton to Chapel-en-le Frith, and back to Nottingham via Chesterfield and Clay Cross, sleeping in fields and 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 … 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’.

Source:

Sillitoe, A. Lawrence and the Real England. A Staple Special (1985)

The Horsey World

On By SteveIn Road users1 Comment

A jolly holiday crowd at Matlock Bath

Today it is easy to forget the importance of the horse before the twentieth century. Leaving cavalry and racing aside, they were critical in agriculture and travel, reaching a peak in the nineteenth century when there were an estimated three million horses in Britain. Selective breeding during the medieval period led to horses replacing oxen in plough teams, while others were bred for speed and endurance. Travellers, unless poor, generally went on horseback, certainly before reliable coach travel was available in the 1830s. For many professions, such as doctors and lawyers, travel by horse was simply the most convenient mode, combining flexibility with reasonable speed, for long and short journeys. For example, James Clegg of Chapel- en-le Frith, a dissenting minister, rode nearly 1,000 miles in the first half of 1730, according to his diary.

Clegg’s chapel at Chinley near Chapel-en-le Frith

The ability to ride was necessary for these kinds of jobs, and gentlemen in particular were expected to ride with a certain style, especially when out hunting, or otherwise displaying their social status. When and how boys (and it was generally males before the modern period) learned to ride is a good question, and although there have always been riding schools, we can presume that most were taught by their fathers, or servants such as grooms. The population was mainly rural until the mid-nineteenth century, when riding ability would have been as common as knowing how to cycle is today.

Matlock Bath as was

DH Lawrence provides an example of this in his novel The Rainbow. Set in the 1870s, he depicts the young farmer Tom Brangwen riding from Cossall to Matlock Bath:

“One Whitsuntide he went a jaunt, with two other young fellows, on horseback to Matlock, and thence to Bakewell. Matlock was at that time just becoming a famous beauty spot, visited from Manchester and from the Staffordshire towns. In the hotel where the young men took lunch, there were two girls , and the parties struck up a friendship”.

In the story Tom gets off with one of the girls, tells his companions not to wait for him, and leaves his horse with an ostler while he takes the young lady for a walk in the woods. This is a reminder of the variety of jobs that were involved with the horsey world, such as ostlers, grooms, saddle makers and many more. The 1871 census for the parish of Matlock lists 12 wheelwrights, 15 blacksmiths, 17 cab drivers, 6 coachmen, 8 grooms, and 4 saddlers, not to mention a horse breaker, a coach maker and an ostler.

Cromford to Langley Mill in six gates

On By SteveIn Places, Roadside features1 Comment

Toll cottage at top of Bullbridge Hill

The Cromford Bridge to Langley Mill turnpike wasn’t the snappiest name, but the road was intended to provide access to Nottingham from Cromford long before the current A6 route was built. Opened in 1766 it ran beside the Derwent from Cromford Bridge to Lea, then up Mill Lane to Holloway, along Leashaw to Wakebridge, through Crich (where it crossed the Alfreton-Ashbourne turnpike), and down the Common to Bullbridge. Here it went over and then under the Cromford Canal, through Sawmills to Hartshay, and via Ripley to Codnor and finally Langley Mill. At least two of the hills involved, particularly the one at Bullbridge, must have been challenging for horse-drawn traffic.

One of the distinctive cast-iron mileposts

As with many turnpikes, toll collection was auctioned off, and a notice from 1827 announces the annual auction at the (recently renovated) Canal Inn at Bullbridge, where bids for running the six gates had to start at £464, which sum was the previous year’s surplus. It is difficult to identify all the toll cottages today, but the one below, on Leashaw, and the house above, at the top of Bullbridge Hill, are clearly survivors. Until quite recently the Gate Inn, at Codnor Gate, was another reminder of the turnpike’s route. Today the road is still marked by these cast-iron mileposts (although not all have survived), though it seems likely that they are nineteenth-century replacements for earlier stones. It is not clear whether a traveller on the whole route would have paid at each gate, or as seems more likely, only once on exit.

Leaving Holloway via Leashaw today

Curiously this road has been much in the news recently: firstly when the section near Cromford was eroded by the flooded Derwent in 2019, leading to a three-year closure, and now this year when a section of Leashaw slipped downhill due to heavy rain, leaving the road closed to all but cyclists and walkers. The house on the left was the toll cottage for this stretch of the turnpike. Currently there is no date for re-opening the route, despite the inconvenience for local people and businesses, and as can be seen in the picture, nobody actually at work!