People

  • Riding with Cobbett – 2

    In the early modern period, gentlemen – and the more daring ladies – preferred to travel on horseback. William Cobbett, touring England in 1822 for his masterpiece ‘Rural Rides’, explains this preference: My object was … to see the country… and to do this you must either go on foot or on horseback. With a…

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  • Riding with Cobbett -1

    William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a radical farmer, journalist and campaigner who travelled extensively in England in the 1820s and 1830s, inspecting the state of farming and farm workers. His reports, collected as Rural Rides, also give us a picture of life on the roads in those decades before the railways radically changed patterns of travel.…

  • Rain

    It’s easy to assume that every extreme weather event – heatwave, drought or flood – must be the product of global warming. However, the storm that hit Derbyshire almost exactly 192 years ago, on the 26th of June 1830, could hardly have been caused by this. The event is recorded in the diary of Sir…

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  • Signposting the Peaks and Paths

    Many progressive social movements, such as the Cooperative Society, started in the Manchester area, and in 1894 this was the birthplace of one of Britain’s oldest footpath protection clubs, the Peak and Northern Footpath Society. Today it operates in Lancashire, parts of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cheshire and Staffordshire, with its headquarters in Stockport. Partly thanks to…

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  • The two Williams

    Diaries can be a useful source in studying travel patterns in the past. William Hodkin was a farmer and general dealer at Beeley, on the Chatsworth estate in the mid-nineteenth century. He kept a diary, mainly of his farming work, from 1864 to 1866, which reveals the shape of his trading network. Although the station…

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