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  • 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.…

  • A Derbyshire walk with DH Lawrence 120 years ago

    ‘But it’s real England – the hard pith of England’, Lawrence wrote to Rolf Gardiner in 1926. He was referring to the hill country of the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire border, near his birthplace at Eastwood, going on to offer to ‘walk it with you one day’.  Various walks described in Sons and Lovers explore this…

  • Brailsford byways

    Despite being close to the busy A52 Derby to Ashbourne road, Brailsford church, All Saints, is unusually isolated, west of the village, and nearer to Ednaston. But the map shows it at the centre of no less than six footpaths and bridle ways, one of which is now waymarked as ‘Centenary Way’ but known locally…