Edale – The Old Roads of Derbyshire

*The Snake Inn: Still a challenge for cyclists*

The Snake Pass on the A57 Sheffield to Manchester route was one of the highest turnpike roads in the country, and is still plagued by winter closures due to snow and landslips. Reaching a height of 1,680 feet, it offers the most direct route between the two cities and may have been in use for thousands of years, yet there is little agreement about its history. On the 1:25,000 OS map much of the route as shown as a Roman road, and is named ‘Doctor’s Gate’, but although there was a 16th century Vicar of Glossop called Doctor Talbot there is little hard evidence to date the road further back in time.

The Derbyshire Portway can be clearly traced from the Trent to Mam Tor, and from there the best route north is eastwards along Edale, then to climb up into the Woodlands Valley which heads northwest to the Pass. Today the bridleway lies to the west of the main road at first, then switches to the east above Alport Bridge, since the going is easier on that side. However, apart from the place name ‘Alport’ there is little evidence for speculation about its history, not even for the ‘Roman’ road – Dodd and Dodd (Peakland Roads and Trackways) claim that some Roman paving can be found, but such stonework is almost impossible to date and at this altitude it seems unlikely to have survived on the surface. However, Doctor’s Gate may well have been a medieval packhorse route.

In the early nineteenth century the Dukes of Norfolk and Devonshire – principal landowners in the area – decided to build a turnpike road over the Pass to encourage trade between South Yorkshire and Lancashire. Part of the route, from Glossop up to the top of the Pass, was a completely new route, and this partly accounts for the debts that the Trust, established in 1818, ran up. There is some confusion about the engineer responsible: the Glossop Heritage website claims it was John Macadam, while other sources (e.g. Dodd and Dodd) say Telford. The road opened in 1821, but the arrival of a railway in 1845 was powerful competition, and when the Trust was wound up in 1870 it had debts of many millions, in modern terms. Since then the Pass has posed continual problems for the highway authority, being regularly closed by snow and landslips: all of which must add to the difficulty of keeping the Snake Inn, near the top of the Pass, running.

What about that snake? Nothing to do with the winding road – it’s the emblem of the Cavendish family, joint financiers of the road, seen here at Chatsworth.

In medieval England many parishes, especially in upland areas. were larger than they are now, and parish churches consequently were more dispersed. Although not everyone attended church regularly, for most people a churchyard burial was critical, since that was the key to an afterlife. As a result coffins often had to be carried several miles to the nearest consecrated churchyard. An extreme example is Edale, where the funeral processions from this scattered community had to cross the ridge into the Hope Valley via Hollins Cross, which marked the site where the coffin could be rested while the pall bearers had a much-needed rest on this four or five mile journey to Hope church.

Many churches are at the centre of a network of paths, as can be seen in the case of Horsley, to which at least five footpaths lead. Other examples include Bonsall, Crich and Morley. Of course these routes were not only for funerals – they would also have provided a direct route for Sunday worshippers. Especially before the growth of non-conformist chapels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many comunities were quite distant from a place of worship; for instance Riber folk had a very steep walk down to St Giles at Matlock.

*Horsley church can be seen in the distance at the end of this field path*

In some parts of Britain a folklore grew up around these ‘coffin paths’ or ‘lych ways’, which were thought to be haunted by the spirits of the dead. Shakespeare’s Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, says:

Now it is the time of night,

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church way paths to glide.

The Old Roads of Derbyshire

Tag: Edale

Snakes and dukes

Church paths and coffin paths