Crich – Page 2 – The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Travellers have always needed to drink, and so have their horses and dogs. Yet on the ancient ridgeways, crossing the limestone hills of north Derbyshire, there are few streams or ponds, and so providing drinking places has been critical. Stone troughs fed by springs are found by many old roads, though it is not clear who first installed them. The four horses needed to haul a stagecoach uphill for a mile or two would have needed a long drink by the time they reached the top of the climb.

Wells were another source of water, though usually designed just for human use. and more commonly found in villages. Well dressing is a famous Derbyshire custom, and is normally seen as a celebration of a reliable and plentiful water supply – possibly pre-Christian, although now, as the example above shows, co-opted by the Church. Wells have frequently given their name to streets, as with Coldwell Street in Wirksworth or Coldwell End in Youlgrave. Others were sanctified with a saint’s name, such as St Alkmund’s well above, or St Anne’s well in Buxton. It seems likely that the tradition of ‘holy wells’ pre-dates the Reformation in 1539, and in some cases the water from these wells was thought to have a healing value.

Today it seems shocking how long it took to provide a piped, clean water supply in many Derbyshire villages. Youlgrave was unusual in that it installed its stone reservoir in the centre of the village in 1829 (below), from which local wells such as the one above were supplied. Even today Youlgrave still has its own water supply, independent of Severn Trent. But right up to 1940 nearby Elton people relied on carrying water in buckets from a spring at Burycliffe, half a mile from the village.

The names of some old wells can be found on large-scale OS maps, for example Lady Wall Well, north of Baslow on the old route over the moor to Sheffield. Sadly, many of these have become filled with rubbish and are easily overlooked. Cleaning and renovating a local well would be a valuable project for a volunteer neighbourhood group, and help to preserve a link with the not-so-distant past.

Maps are an obvious choice in researching the road network of the past, but they have several limitations. There are no accurate maps of Derbyshire’s roads before the mid-eighteenth century, when Peter Burdett published his inch-to-a-mile map of the county in 1767 (see section above). We can assume that the road network presented by Burdett was essentially the same system that had operated since medieval times, but many minor roads and paths were not included.

Burdett marks the new turnpike roads with solid lines, and shows the milestones, while broken lines are reserved for less important roads. The map reveals many changes over the past 250 years: East Moor covered a much larger area, for example, while the centre of Matlock was focused on St Giles, rather than Crown Square as today. Some of the place names are unreliable, so Whatstandwell is written Hotstanddell – perhaps the surveyor misheard a local accent!

Burdett’s map was revised in 1791 to include new industrial sites such as coal mines and the Cromford canal, but the next large-scale map was Sanderson’s map of 1835, ‘Twenty miles around Mansfield’, which covers the eastern part of Derbyshire and shows field boundaries and many road names.

This section of the map, covering a similar area around Crich, shows the growth of enclosures in the early nineteenth century over East Moor, as well as displaying the road network in more detail. At a scale of two and a quarter inches to the mile it was the largest scale map so far produced, and so is more valuable in some areas than the Ordnance Survey one inch to the mile map of Derbyshire, first produced in 1840.

Clearly all such early maps have their drawbacks and omissions, but for road historians they provide an invaluable reference source, full of clues to the landscape of the past.

The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Tag: Crich

Wells, springs and troughs

Using maps to research old roads