People

  • 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…

  • 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…