The Waters of Life and Death

On May 7, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Places, Roadside featuresLeave a comment

It is easy to forget the significance of a good water supply for both residents and travellers, something which is taken for granted today. But less than a century ago, up to 1940, the village of Elton was dependent for its water on Burycliffe Troughs, half a mile away, water which had to be laboriously carried by householders in buckets. Yet nearby Youlgrave had built its own water system in 1829, as indicated on its central cistern. Though this is not in use today, the village still maintains its independent supply, and provides it much cheaper than Severn Trent!

In nineteenth-century villages water was not usually piped to individual houses. Instead villagers collected it from wells scattered around, like this attractive example, also from Youlgrave, titled ‘The Gift’ and dated 1876. Similar examples can be found in many Derbyshire settlements.

Springs and wells had symbolic value in Christianity (and probably also in pagan beliefs). A late example of this is St John’s chapel in St John’s Road, Matlock Bath, a remarkable Arts and Crafts structure of 1895 built over a well, presumably a reference to St John as baptist. The stained glass windows also illustrate ‘The Waters of Life’ and ‘The Waters of Death’.

Many drinking troughs and wells can be found outside villages, as a critical part of the old transport infrastructure. The spring-fed example below, found near the top of the long climb out of Wirksworth and just below the Malt Shovel crossroads, would have provided a welcome drink for horses labouring up the incline, as well as for cattle and other animals being driven to and from market.

*Drinking well on Wirksworth – Whatstandwell Road*

Sadly, many of these wells have become choked with debris and allowed to dry up. It would be a positive addition to the landscape if they were cleaned and restored – and any passing horses would be very thankful.

Bridge building

On May 3, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Rivers and bridges1 Comment

In the current dry weather it’s quite easy to climb down and inspect the underside of the arches of Matlock bridge, a structure thought to date from the fifteenth century. As can be seen in the photo, this reveals a clear joint between the original structure and the widening carried out in 1904, which allowed two-way traffic on the bridge (since reduced to one-way in the latest traffic scheme). This is a reminder that most pre-twentieth century bridges would have only been wide enough for one cart or coach at a time, as is still the case with One-Arch Bridge at Chatsworth.

Some were still narrower, such as Holme Bridge, on the River Wye upstream of Bakewell; just wide enough for a train of packhorses to cross. This is a reminder that bridge building was high skilled and thus expensive, yet bridges were absolutely critical to the transport network. The earliest bridges probably had a wooden superstructure resting on stone piers: easier to construct but liable to be washed away in any flood. All-stone bridges, with arches and breakwaters to deflect floating debris, were commonly constructed from the twelfth century but their cost was often met by a local monastery or abbey. In addition, tolls were frequently charged to pay for their upkeep.

Important river crossing often had chapels attached, as with St Mary’s bridge in Derby (the only bridge in medieval times) or Cromford bridge (now ruined). The chapels would have provided a shrine for travellers to pray for a safe onward journey, and doubtless to leave an offering for bridge maintenance.

*Bridge over River Bradford at Youlgrave*

With most ancient bridges, establishing a date is almost as difficult as dating a road. The example above, with its simple round arch, and too narrow for a cart, could be anything from a hundred and fifty to a thousand years old, and would probably have been repaired many times after especially violent floods.

What’s going on at Wingfield?

On April 28, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Places2 Comments

The ruins of Wingfield Manor are an impressive sight, on a hill overlooking the River Amber and above the village of South Wingfield. The manor was only a mile west of the old Roman road known as Ryknield Street, from Derby to Chesterfield and Sheffield, still a major route but now the A61. This road would have been convenient for the second owners of the Manor, the Talbot family, Earls of Shrewsbury, who also owned Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor.

The buildings were deliberately ruined during the Civil War to prevent their use by Royalist forces, after a Parliamentary siege in 1644. Since the eighteenth century the structure has been effectively abandoned, although substantial ruins have survived. The most famous occupant was Mary Queen of Scots, imprisoned here for some years from 1569, in the care of the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess of Hardwick.

*Mary Queen of Scots – all dressed up and nowhere to go*

Clearly such an extensive ruin with famous associations should attract flocks of visitors. The Manor is in the ‘care’ of English Heritage (“unlimited access to hundreds of historic places” – website) but is firmly shut up, as it has been for several years. Their web page says: ‘currently closed for the safety of visitors, and no public access is allowed’. A meaningless statement that explains nothing.

Over a hundred years ago no such restrictions applied. DH Lawrence paid a visit at Easter 1905 with a group of friends, a visit which he fictionalised in his novel Sons and Lovers:

‘The young folk were in raptures. They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them’.

However, despite the best efforts of English Heritage, it is possible to get a good view of some parts of the ruin by following the public footpath around the back. Starting from the village and heading south, follow the track downhill, beside the garden wall of Wingfield Hall. Cross the stream at the bottom and bear right uphill. The ruins of the Manor can be clearly seen on the right.

Surprising Bradbourne

On April 18, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn PlacesLeave a comment

Halfway between Brassington and Tissington is the small village of Bradbourne, with a population of just over a hundred. Yet the substantial church was once part of a priory, and was the centre of a network of local chapelries. The church tower, complete with elaborately carved doorway, is Romanesque. while in the churchyard is a rare Saxon cross from about 800, showing a crucifixion scene. Why would such a small settlement have such rich monuments?

Crosses of this date are quite rare in Derbyshire: Bakewell and Eyam have good examples. Clearly older than the church itself, they may have signalled the conversion of the area to Christianity, and formed a base for preaching before the church was built. It is possible that such crosses were more common, but many may have been destroyed during iconoclastic periods such as the Reformation. Wirksworth, only a few miles away, would probably be the local minster church.

*Doorway to tower with a variety of carved creatures*

There is little sign that Bradbourne was ever on a major route. According to the parish council website, the north eastern parish boundary was the course of the Roman road from Little Chester to Buxton, but no source is given for this claim. However, this is now good walking country; the Limestone Way runs about a mile to the north, and to the south Haven Hill (partly access land) offers a convenient circular walk.

The two Williams

On February 24, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn People, PlacesLeave a comment

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 at Rowsley was open at this time he made relatively little use of the railway, either riding on horseback or travelling with a cart when collecting or selling livestock or deadstock.

During two and a half months April to June 1864 he travelled to Bakewell 13 times, to Calton Lees 5 times, and to Chesterfield, Beeley Moor and Rowsley 4 times each. Other trips took him to Ashford, Matlock and Edensor. Interestingly, the state of the roads is never discussed: presumably he knew them all so well that there seemed no need to mention it, although he does once mention that his horse had collapsed on the steep hill to Chesterfield.

*Hilltop House, Beeley, one of William’s regular destinations*

It has to be admitted that William Hodkin was no Pepys. A typical entry (Thursday July 5th, 1864) reads: ‘Went rabbitting in the morning, making bills out at night. Father not doing much Thomas thrashing John carting stone to the highways’. This last job is a reminder that the roads around Beeley were not then tarmaced, and were still maintained by local labour. His wife is only referred to as ‘The Mrs’, although there are frequent mentions of the weather, and the occasional reference to the vicar’s sermon shows that William did sometimes take time off.

*William’s landlord, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire*

Defoe’s Derbyshire tour

On February 16, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn People, PlacesLeave a comment

Biography of Daniel Defoe author of "Robinson Crusoe" — *An early tourist*

Few people living in Derbyshire in the eighteenth century have left an account of their travels; clearly they didn’t feel any need to describe their everyday experiences. Therefore it is left to the handful of early tourists to provide an impression of journeying in the county three hundred years ago. Daniel Defoe was an early novelist and journalist who visited many English counties in the 1720s in order to produce his A Tour of England and Wales.

Beginning at Derby, he had clearly chosen a wet season for his visit, since he had to abandon plans to visit Ashbourne on account of ‘the river drowning the low-grounds by a sudden shower, and hastening to the Trent with a most outrageous stream’, a reminder that, not so long ago, travel was very much at the whim of the weather. There are other references to the Derwent as ‘a frightful creature when the hills load her current with water’.

Defoe’s next stop was Wirksworth, which he found interesting due to the lead trade, despite the inhabitants being ‘a rude boorish kind of people’. The most remarkable part of this visit was an excursion to Harborough Rocks, which was called the Giant’s Tomb at that time. Here he found a lead miner’s family living in a cave, which had been lived in by his family for several generations. Defoe was both horrified, and impressed that people could cope with such crude conditions: ‘they seemed to live very pleasantly, the children look’d plump and fat’. Defoe’s party had a whip-round and gave the miner’s wife several shillings. (Today the cave can be visited quite easily by climbing up from the High Peak Trail).

Other items on his itinerary were more predictable: the Wonders of the Peak, and a focus on spas, which were just beginning to be significant destinations at this time. He is suitably impressed by Chatsworth, but comments about the moor above the house: ‘a waste and howling wilderness, over which, when strangers travel, they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way’. As for getting to Matlock (which he labels as a village), Defoe maintains that the warm springs would be worth visiting if access was not by ‘ a base, stony, mountainous road’ – presumably the route over Scarthin, which was eventually superseded by blasting the present road through the rocks at Cromford.

*Nineteenth-century painting of High Tor, Matlock*

The Stonehenge of the north?

On February 5, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Places, Prehistory2 Comments

Between Buxton and Youlgreave, high up above the Derbyshire dales, Arbor Low is the largest henge monument in the north of England. The November morning I visited was bleak and grey, with a keen wind from the west and a temperature barely above freezing. Unsurprisingly I was the only visitor when I arrived, although another car pulled up in the layby shortly after. I walked up the farm track for several hundred metres to where an English Heritage board gave some rudimentary information. There are two related sites here: the circular henge and Gib Hill, apparently a tumulus, a field away to the west. Then I walked up to the farmyard, where a small sign asked for a modest £1 for using ‘private land’.

Many farms in the Peak District are tatty; this one looked particularly run-down. A woman was pushing a wheelbarrow full of firewood through the yard – nobody else was around. The cattle were still in the fields, so the stall block was empty. There was a sign advertising‘B & B’ by the roadside, but I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to stay in such a bleak location. Presumably they earn a few pounds a week from visitors’ contributions, but there was no attempt to offer tourist fare such as teas or postcards.

Beyond the farmyard Arbor Low is a circular bank containing a ditch and inside that over 40 stones, lying flat, with a few more stones at the centre. Impressive enough, especially given the situation, with a view of several miles in every direction. There are information boards at both the henge and the Gib Hill site, although these contain little actual information, beyond the standard visual recreations of scary looking people doing weird things. Apparently there has been no excavation here for a century, and so our knowledge of these places is even vaguer than usual with the prehistoric.

The contrast with the real Stonehenge is total. On Salisbury Plain coaches full of tourists, many from abroad, arrive every hour. There are lavish facilities for visitors, and a hefty £13.90 price tag to buy the timed tickets. Hundreds of visitors wander round the circle every hour. Scores of books and dozens of TV programmes have attempted to reveal the ‘secrets of the circle’. Yet, standing on the bank around the fallen stones, with an icy wind in my hair, I felt far closer to the past, whatever it contained, than I ever had in the south.

Burdett’s map of 1767 showing The Street north of Pikehall

Something not mentioned by English Heritage is that a Roman road ran through this area just 100 metres away, south east from Buxton, and that this probably followed the line of an older ridgeway. A henge monument on the scale of Arbor Low must have attracted visitors for (presumably) seasonal festivals from all over the district, and so the proximity of the henge to the road is not mere coincidence. It can be seen that the eighteenth-century turnpike did not follow the exact route of the older road, which remained in use until the time of Burdett’s map, but which has now disappeared except as a parish boundary. Overall the route presents a classic example of a road that may be at least four thousand years old, starting as a ridgeway serving the henge and other sites nearby, then being re-engineered by the Romans, and more recently re-routed as a turnpike road.

A life on the road

On January 22, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Road usersLeave a comment

Tramps" — illustration for "The Uncommercial Traveller" by Sol Eytinge, Jr.

Tramps on the roadside in Victorian times

In contrast with the rich and powerful, whose historical journeys were often recorded, we know very little about the thousands of people in the past who made a living from being on the move. Some may have been semi-criminals, but the great majority supported themselves by providing a service; moving goods to where they were wanted. Yet the stigma attached to itinerant workers persisted; they were often seen as a threat to the settled householder or shopkeeper. For some, such as the drovers, it could be a profitable business, while others had no choice but to beg from village to village, relying on the kindness of strangers.

Well into the twentieth century tramps were a familiar sight on our roads, with George Orwell providing an unusual glimpse of their lives in his Down and Out in Paris and London. Written in the 1930s, he describes the grim conditions in the ‘Spike’, where workhouse-style accommodation was provided by the local authorities. Today, of course, the volume of traffic on the roads makes old-style tramping impractical, so that the destitute sleep rough in cities, where there is more food, money and shelter.

Gypsies and Caravan (Photos Prints Framed Posters Puzzles Cards Gifts Canvas...) #20031226 — *A gypsy family in the 1930s*

Gypsies, travellers or Roma are one marginal group that has attracted much interest and been heavily romanticised by writers such as George Borrow, while surviving into modern times. But others have been made redundant by the increase in personal mobility – we forget how isolated a Derbyshire village would have been up to the 1950s. Drovers were one of the most respected trades, responsible for the well-being of herds of valuable animals and their safe delivery to market. They would avoid turnpikes and use their own routes, with an overnight halt in an inn with grazing attached. Today it is difficult to trace droving roads, though place names such as Bullbridge may provide clues.

*Probable west-east drove road near Minninglow*

Pedlars (or travellers or hawkers) supplied the needs of isolated farms and cottages, in particular catering for women who could rarely visit a market town yet needed lightweight items such as sewing materials. They carried their goods in a pack, today commemorated in the name of the Hathersage pub, the Scotsman’s Pack. They must have been welcome visitors, but it is now hard to imagine how difficult their lives would have been, outdoors in all weathers and with the burden of the pack. Another significant group were the badgers or higglers, who bought goods such as eggs and butter from farmers and resold them at market. In theory they needed a licence to operate, so that for example in 1748 179 licences were issued at the Derbyshire Quarter Sessions, although many people may have operated unlicensed. As few, if any of these thousands of itinerant workers left a written record, tracing their lives is frustratingly difficult, but clearly their work was vital for the rural economy of the pre-motor age.

Stagecoach

On January 12, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn Road users, Roadside featuresLeave a comment

The romantic image of the stagecoach, as seen on hundreds of Christmas cards, portrays the coach’s arrival at a snowy inn, horns being blown to warn the landlord to make ready for the hungry passengers. But the real experience must have been less glamorous: unheated and crowded. Travel by stagecoach became quicker and somewhat more comfortable during the later eighteenth century, thanks to better turnpike roads and steel springs. However, it was always expensive and never popular, many men and some women preferring to ride their own (or hired) horses. Hogarth’s print satirises the discomforts of being squeezed into a small compartment for a long day’s journey, while those travelling ‘outside’ (at cheaper rates) were always in danger of falling off. But by the early nineteenth century the trip from Derby to London could be done in one long day, saving the expense of hotels enroute.

Peacock Hotel, Four Lane Ends, Oakerthorpe, near Alfreton, c 1950?s — *The Peacock, Oakerthorpe in the 1950s*

Stagecoaches were so-called as they had to travel in stages, changing horses every 10-12 miles. Pulling such a heavy load (at least half a dozen passengers, the coachman and the coach) horses needed to be rested after that distance. Consequently coaching inns were built in most towns served by stagecoach routes, but also at strategic points along the roads. They can often be identified by an arch to allow the coach to enter the yard behind, as at the Red Lion in Wirksworth. The Peacock at Oakerthorpe (now called Pestos at the Peacock) was sited at the junction of two important turnpikes: Nottingham – Newhaven and Derby – Chesterfield. The name ‘Peacock’ suggests a connection with the Duke of Rutland, whose family symbol this is. Another coaching inn financed by a great Derbyshire landowner was the Newhaven Hotel, built by the Duke of Devonshire at the junction of the Nottingham turnpike with the Derby – Buxton route.

The growth of travel by stagecoach led to the development of a huge ‘horse economy’, requiring not only coachmen but ostlers, farriers, chambermaids, cooks and other indoor staff. The larger inns would have stabled at least 100 horses. This all went into decline after 1840, as the railways spread over the country and provided much cheaper and more comfortable travel, although in the more remote parts of Derbyshire stage coaches continued in use to the 1880s.

The secrets of Shuckstone

On January 5, 2022February 4, 2024 By SteveIn People, Places, Roadside features, Walks and walkersLeave a comment

*The cross base, with dandelions, looking east*

Starting from Whatstandwell Bridge, if you follow the track from the hamlet of Robin Hood up through the quarry and wood to Wakebridge, and then on past Wakebridge Farm up to the top of the hill, the route finally levels off and you come to Shuckstone Fields, behind Holly Grange Farm and above Lea. This large field contains the intersection of five footpaths, and Shuckstone Cross must have marked this point. Today only the base remains, and the markings on this are illegible, but according to local historian George Wrigglesworth the four sides were marked C (for Crich) A (possibly Ashover) M (Mansfield or Matlock) and W (Wirksworth). In the late eighteenth century a pot containing Roman coins was dug up here, presumably buried by someone wanting a clear marker for their savings. Not far away is a ‘Holy Well’ of three compartments, which could have offered refreshment for travellers.

The term ‘cross’ can be misleading: the crosses found in country churchyards, as at Eyam, had a cross shape and were often preaching crosses, while a cross as at Shuckstone was simply a stone shaft held in a square base which acted as a waymark or signpost. This marker would have been clearly visible at this high point (nearly 900 feet), which was moorland until a couple of hundred years ago: the 1791 map shows that the area was the southern tip of East Moor, an expanse of rough pasture which stretched from here north towards Chatsworth and then Sheffield.

The Cross may have also been a boundary marker, since the same map (Burdett’s) also shows that the track up from the Derwent runs along the old wapentake boundary, with the wapentakes of Wirksworth to the west and Morleyston to the east. According to Kenneth Cameron, (The Place-names of Derbyshire Part 2) the name ‘Shuckstone’ is fairly recent, and older records, going back to the Domesday Book, refer to this spot as ‘Shuckthorn’ or similar, meaning the Devil’s thorn tree. This is certainly a location well worth visiting, but probably not on a dark night.