People

  • Completing fishermen

    Charles Cotton (1630-1687) was the owner of (the now demolished) Beresford Hall in Beresford Dale, on the upper reaches of the River Dove. As a Royalist sympathiser he found it prudent to live quietly in the country after the Parliamentary victory, but he was also a notable writer who wrote poetry in praise of the…

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  • Unwillingly to school …

    Today few young children walk to primary school alone, for a variety of reasons including parental perceptions of danger. In fact, the image of mum in a large Range Rover driving her offspring to the school gates has become a cliche. Yet 150 years ago children who were lucky enough to go to school often…

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  • Mr Burdett, map maker and …

    Peter and Hannah Peter Perez Burdett (c.1734-1793) is a fascinating example of an eighteenth-century artist, surveyor, amateur scientist and … serial debtor! His map of Derbyshire (1767) is the first accurate survey of the county, at the scale of an inch to a mile, and is invaluable to local historians. He was a friend of…

  • “A fine lady upon a white horse …”

    Woman riding side-saddle: No portrait of Celia appears to exist. Celia Fiennes (1662-1741) was a well-connected lady who toured much of England on horseback around the end of the seventeenth century. Her journal provides a rare insight into the Peak District at this time, before turnpikes but when ‘tourism’ was just beginning. Although independent female…

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  • The romance of the road

    Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with stars to see, Bread I dip in the river, That’s the life for a man like me, That’s the life for ever. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his…