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  • Trinity mysteries

    The evocatively-named Coldharbour Lane runs along a ridge to High Oredish, and then becomes a holloway, dropping and twisting down to Brackenfield village. The views to the east are spectacluar, with Ogston Reservoir in the middle distance. Before the lane loses height, a public footpath is signed leading downhill though fields, then into a pine…

  • The (very) old roads

    Just how old are the ‘old roads’? How were the first roads developed? These questions are difficult to answer, but worth a try! The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, and the landscape of Britain must have gradually become more wooded as temperatures rose. Mammals would have arrived via the land bridge to…

  • Silly signs

    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…

  • Hermits of the Bridge

    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…

  • The next station stop is Duffield … and then Duffield

    Today’s tech tycoons play with their spacecraft, but 150 years ago a wealthy Victorian built his own railway in his garden at Duffield Bank, complete with several tunnels and six stations. Sir Arthur Heywood had inherited money and the baronetcy from his father, and as a gifted amateur engineer wanted to test his belief in…