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  • 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…

  • Cross purposes?

    Derbyshire has plenty of stone, as shown by its characteristic dry-stone walls, and walkers may find pillars of stone, like the example above, set in the landscape for no apparent reason. Impossible to date, and clearly not redundant gateposts, they can only be assumed to mark some long-lost route. In other places there does seem…

  • A very short history of Minninglow

    The double ring of beech trees that mark Minninglow hilltop (at about 370 metres above sea level) form a distinctive landmark that can be recognised from far away. Today it can be accessed by permissive footpaths from the High Peak Trail and another unnamed lane that runs east-west below it. But the story of Minninglow…