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  • 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…

  • Christmas at Mountain Cottage

    In summer 1918, near the end of the First World War, DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda were forced to move from the south of England to Derbyshire, in the Midlands he thought he had escaped from years before. Out of work and hard up, having been harassed by officialdom for his wife’s supposed pro-German…

  • Celestial journeys

    The Pilgrim’s Progress, from this World to that Which is to Come must be one of the most influential books ever published in English. Today it has become common to speak of ‘my cancer journey’ or ‘our journey through bankruptcy’, using the metaphor of life, or part of life, as a journey. It is also…

  • That elusive cromlech at Riber

    Cromlechs are ancient megalithic structures, thought to pre-date stone circles, so possibly over 6,000 years old. Welsh examples consist of a flat cap stone supported by several upright stones, as in the photo above. They may have been burial sites, but they certainly were not ‘Druidical altars’, as was imagined by early antiquarians. As far…

  • The books of the road

    The last, unfinished novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, St Ives, is the exciting story of an escaped French prisoner of war in the Napoleonic period. After breaking out of prison in Edinburgh he heads south to England, first in company with a couple of drovers and then, over the border, on the Great North Road.…