January 2026 – The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Travellers by road and rail have been confronted by baffling or unhelpful signs for many years. The example above, warning vagabonds who loiter in Alport that they may be ‘taken up’, supposes that such vagabonds can read, which seems unlikely in the (?) early nineteenth century. The modern equivalent must be the numerous ROAD CLOSED signs currently found all over the county, which either don’t specify which road is closed, or else mean the road is only half closed.

The tone of the wording on signs can vary from the curt (above) to the ultra-polite (below). To ‘request’ a pattern of behaviour is genteel, but to ‘earnestly request’ makes it impossible not to comply . Both these examples can be seen at Derby’s Museum of Making, which has a wonderful collection of these signs from the Midland Railway.

Other station signs are a reminder of the heyday of railway travel, when waiting rooms were not only provided for the different classes of ticket holders, but also separately for men and women. So presumably a large station like Derby would have had four different waiting rooms!

*Did they provide a blazing coal fire too?*

The railway authorities seem to have had a weakness for verbose and very formal inscriptions. Trespassers on the canal towpath or anyone having a dip in the canal was unlikely to bother to read all of this threat (below), while anyone about to spit might not understand language like ‘abstain’ or ‘objectionable’ – though the threat of TB was very real before the arrival of antibiotics.

More earnest requests

My favourite sign, which is quite unintelligible, must have been displayed in a works context, so presumably would be understood by those who worked there (below). There must have been hundreds of signs like these around the railway network, all nicely produced in iron or steel. It would be interesting to know if the railway company made them in-house, or if they used a specialist supplier.

However, the prize for the daftest sign of all must go to a modern effort, found on the A6 at Ambergate. What, you wonder, would be enforced by a helicopter? The speed limit? You imagine a ‘copter chasing a BMW down the road, and swooping onto the roof of the offending vehicle. This has all the making of a new reality TV programme …

Today the image of a hermit is usually a scruffy-looking character living in a remote hovel. But although the route of the Derbyshire Portway is marked by several such hermitages in caves, the term was also used for men who were effectively toll collectors on key bridges. Such bridges were a common good, but expensive to build and maintain, especially on the major rivers of Derwent and Trent, and the church played a major role in their maintenance. A good example is St Mary’s bridge in Derby, whose hermit in 1488 was John Senton, a married man who (unusually) shared his duties with his wife. He had the job of guarding the many votive offerings given by locals, as well as collecting tolls from travellers. The right to collect tolls at bridges was known as ‘pontage’, and might be granted by the king or a bishop, usually for three years.

Today the chapel has quite an austere interior, but in the medieval period it would have been decorated with offerings, such as (spelling modernised):

One coat of crimson velvet, decorated with gold, covered in silver coins

A crown of silver and gold

A great brooch of silver and gilt with a stone in it

A crucifix of silver and gold

One pair of coral beads

One pair of black jet beads

(Taken from the inventory of 1488)

Notably, most of the benefactors were women, and they were possibly members of a female guild dedicated to maintaining the bridge.

Other Derbyshire bridges charging tolls included Cromford, Chesterfield and, notably, Swarkeston, which had to face repeated battering from the River Trent in flood. The list of tolls here gives a graphic picture of the variety of goods on the roads in the high Middle Ages, and the presence of two items imported from Spain indicates the extent of trading networks at this time:

Cask of wine 2d

Skins of lambs, goats, hares or foxes 1/4d

Pack saddle load of cloth 3d

Bale Cordova (i.e. Cordoban leather) 3d

Brushwood 1/4d

Flitches of bacon 1/4d

Source: C. Kerry, Hermits, Fords and Bridge-chapels, The Derbyshire Archaeological Journal, 1892, Vol.14 pp. 54-71

The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Month: January 2026

Silly signs

Hermits of the Bridge