John Byng (1743-1813) was born into a family of soldiers and sailors, the younger son of the 3rd Viscount Torrington. He bought his commission in the Grenadier Guards when he left Westminster School, and retired as Colonel of the Regiment in 1780. Having no landed estate to look after, he decided to spend his early retirement travelling, and between 1780 and 1791 he rode thousands of miles around England, keeping an extensive record of his travels in a series of diaries. He had married, at the age of 24, Bridget Forrest, the daughter of an admiral, who went on to have 14 children with him, all but one of whom (unusually) survived infancy. Presumably Bridget was accustomed to having a semi-absent husband from his military years?

There is clearly a sarcastic element of class consciousness in Byng’s comments on Richard Arkwright’s Willersley Castle when he visited Derbyshire in 1779:

‘Went to where Sr R.A. is building for himself a grand house in the same castellated stile (sic) as one sees at Clapham, and really he has made a happy choice of ground, for by sticking it up on an unsafe bank, he contrives to overlook, not see, the beauties of the river, and the surrounding scenery. It is the house of an overseer surveying the works, not of a gentleman …’.

Byng’s tone must be connected with his position as the younger son: he had inherited no castles, and in the aristocratic world of this period anyone who had actually worked for their fortune was worth a sneer.

Needless to say, John Byng was equally unimpressed by the nearby mill: ‘Every rural sound is sunk in the clamour of cotton works, and the simple peasant is changed into the impudent artisan’. The fact that the ‘simple peasant’ had chosen to work in the mill, as a welcome alternative to lead mining or worse, may not have crossed his mind. But Byng’s reaction was typical of the many tourists who were beginning to scour the Peak District for the romance of wild scenery and Gothic views. His diaries, however, do give the flavour of travel 250 years ago: his servant often rode ahead to reserve rooms at an inn, and would carry a set of sheets so that his master didn’t have to sleep on the damp or dirty bedding often provided by the house!