Country Images - Stay At Home Edition - Pt3

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COUNTRY

STAY AT

HOME BUMPER DIGITAL EDITION

THE BEST OF COUNTRY IMAGES

PART THREE Download our FREE APP and read Country Images today. With the latest and past editions available to download for FREE.

COUNTRY

STAY AT HOME

BUMPER DIGITAL EDITION PART THREE

W

elcome to the third of our special editions of Country Images Magazine. As many are in a “stay at home” situation we felt that you may like a good read from our archives to help pass a little time over a cup of coffee. Our editorial contributors have, over the years, showcased all that is best in Derbyshire alongside articles that explored places further afield. We hope you enjoy this, the first of many, that we will be presenting on line over the next few weeks.

Inside you’ll find a wealth of ideas for your home and garden.

Interesting articles on antiques and collectibles, and places to visit for the future.

Whether you live in the town or country, there is plenty of interest for you to enjoy in this special edition of Country Images magazine.

Jane Plant

THE BEST OF COUNTRY IMAGES

PART THREE

Download our FREE APP and read Country Images today. With the latest and past editions available to download for FREE. 2 Country Images Special Edition

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We are fully ABTA bonded

Country Images Special Edition 3

Functional Beautiful

&

Bring your bathroom up to date with on-trend suites and finishes.

Decem Expressions by Roman Showers

Decem Expressions, a significant innovation in digital glass printing on wetroom panels – it is an exclusive technology to Roman. This breakthrough has been achieved due to a collaboration of technologies with digital print specialists Dimax. Decem Expressions offers three glass design options – Distressed Brick; Glass Blocks; and a Rainforest image which all carry a lifetime guarantee.

For further information visit www.roman-showers.com

EauZone Plus Quintesse by Matki

EauZone Plus Quintesse enclosure provides an interesting alternative to a curved corner enclosure. The pentagonal shape is made from three panels of high quality 10mm safety glass held cleverly in place by Matki’s patented NonSlip Hinges. A choice of handles and finishes including Nickel are available. The EauZone Plus Quintesse comes in a number of standard sizes as well as bespoke sizes and shapes.

For further information visit www.matki.co.uk

4 Country Images Special Edition

AROUND THE HOME

Functional Beautiful

& Vision Dual by Mira

Attached is an image of the Mira Vision Dual, a beautifully designed digital shower with an easy to use ice white, square wireless controller for a truly unique shower solution. The wall mounted wireless controller allows to select your desired temperature and flow settings without needing to set foot in the shower.

For further information visit www.mirashowers.co.uk

Decem Neo Angle by Roman Showers

The ingenious angled design of the Neo Angle Enclosure will work around existing fixtures and fittings, to fit flawlessly into your bathroom space. Its stylish chromed brass selfclosing hinges present an exceptionally smooth door action and create a positive seal for the door. The outward opening doors offer wide and comfortable access and feature a design statement square handle and hardware. The enclosure has its own dedicated Neo Angle Shower Tray to fit perfectly with the enclosure; it is manufactured from Roman Stone using our Solid Surface Technology and incorporates a stylish chrome waste.

For further information visit www.roman-showers.com

Country Images Special Edition 5

EMPORIUM Brintons Launches City Plaids

Brintons carpets have once again delved into their extensive archives to create their brand new collection – City Plaids.

Plaids have stood the test of time and they remain the most desirable pattern in contemporary interior design.

Brintons have given this timeless pattern a modern twist by developing the collection with the trend for vintage and reclaimed textiles in mind. This means that the modern vibrancy of the collection comes through in the bright striking patterns of Welsh Plaids and Harris Tweeds, which combine perfectly with the soft antique hues of cool blues and soft greys. The subtle colour palette of City Plaids gives a fashionable edge to this iconic pattern, and are available in 5 colourways – Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea, Mayfair and Knightsbridge.For local stockists visit www.brintons.co.uk

Mississippi Black Saphire by Crucial Trading The Mississippi collection has had a sleek update, an understated stripe for those looking for a more subtle stripe in their home. 100% wool to take you through the seasons, the Mississippi range is a great way to update your home.

For local stockists visit www.crucial-trading.co.uk or call 01562 743747

Flooring Signature Sedimentary Grey Stone by Amtico Amtico Signature Sedimentary Grey Stone with Myron Motif.

For local stockists visit www.amtico.com or call 08703 504090

Dimensions Plain by Brockway Brockway’s fabulous new Dimensions Plain carpet range is available in 32 vibrant colours.

It’s made from 80 per cent pure New Zealand wool, a sustainable natural fibre with outstanding beauty, performance and maintenance benefits, For local stockists visit www.brockway.co.uk 6 Country Images Special Edition

Signature Lulworth Stone by Amtico Amtico Signature Lulworth Stone and Cadence Atlas stripping in Flagstone laying pattern.

For local stockists visit www.amtico.com or call 08703 504090

EMPORIUM Umbrella Range by Morris & Co

The Morris & Co. umbrella range is inspired by the rich and unique designs found in the extensive Morris & Co. archive, creating a collection embodying the Arts and Crafts aesthetic and ensuring a timeless appeal. This range of beautiful umbrellas has been produced exclusively by Fulton, using only the highest quality materials and engineering standards, before being individually hand ďŹ nished. Each umbrella canopy showcases a bold and colourful translation of Morris & Co’s most iconic and enduring print designs, all of which will brighten even the dullest of rainy days.

For further information and local stockists email sales@fultonumbrellas.com or visit www.william-morris.co.uk

Windsor Sideboard

by Ercol

First designed by Lucian Ercolani in the 1950s it is still in production today. Classic designs of the signature Ercol style are made from ash, using traditional craft techniques and modern machining, the Windsor Collection is still as relevant as ever today.

For further information and local stockists visit www.ercol.com

Country Images Special Edition 7

Perfect Balmy Evenings The time of year has arrived where we can relax and entertain outdoors.

Here are some ideas to make the most of your outside space.

Left:

Pickle Collection by Prestigious

Polly from the Pickle collection are 100% cotton prints, depicting vintage labels and dinky flowers and a fruity patchwork teams with retro coordinates.

The entire Pickle collection can be enhanced by an optional PVC finish.

For local stockist details call 01274 688448 or visit www.prestigious.co.uk 8 Country Images Special Edition

Above:

St Mawes Drinks / Planter Table and Chilgrove Chair Set by Garden Trading

This extremely hardwearing and substantial wooden table has been built to last a lifetime. The elegant and stylish chairs are ideal for outside dining. They are made from PE Rattan, which is coated with a layer of plastic to make it incredibly durable for use outside.

For local stockists visit www.gardentrading.co.uk

Perfect Balmy Evenings Left: Slate Cheeseboard with Handles

by Garden Trading Passing the cheese round with this stylish cheeseboard would be a super way to end any meal. The grey stencilled words ‘Help Yourself ’ will invite your guests to dive in whilst the rustic jute handles on both sides will act as a cushion against the top of the table.

For local stockists visit www.gardentrading.co.uk Below:

Vienna Domes by LSA International

Vienna domes are designed for enhancing the presentation of foods such as cakes and artisan cheeses or displaying a range of decorative objects.

For local stockists visit www.lsa-international.com

Country Images Special Edition 9

Emporium Left:

Anchor Me range by Parlane

For your beach home we have created the ‘anchor me’ range of cushions and wall art and for display look no further than our distressed wooden bookshelves and compass tables.

For local stockists visit www.parlaneinternational.co.uk

Dressed by Alessi

‘Dressed’ egg cup in thermoplastic resin and spoon with soft boiled egg opener in 18/10 stainless steel mirror polished, by Marcel Wanders for Alessi. For those who love their breakfast and more, Marcel Wanders has created a series of additional articles for the “Dressed” service. This big collection reveals one of the typical traits of Wanders’ language, where ancient shapes and style features are echoed in a totally contemporary interpretation.

For local stockists call 0207 5189090 or visit www.alessi.com Below:

Harlequin Bedlinen Autumn/Winter 2015 Katsura by Harlequin

Harlequin’s successful collaboration with Bedeck, one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of luxury bedlinen, continues with the launch of more stunning designs for Autumn/Winter 2015.

Katsura depicts a shadowy and ethereal tree in ‘topaz’ on the front of the duvet cover, with an all over texture printed reverse, piped in indigo.

For local stockists visit www.bedeckhome.com or call 0845 6030861

10 Country Images Special Edition

EMPORIUM

A taste of style

A kitchen doesn’t just have to be functional, it can also be beautiful. A lovely space to create new recipes, perfect old ones or just dine with the family.

Espress-auto Coffee & Tea Machine from Dualit

Available from October 2015, the new Dualit Espress-auto Coffee and Tea machine has been designed to allow customers to enjoy café-quality drinks at home. A dedicated tea function benefits from a temperature boost for a hotter cup of tea, while a manual temperature reduction option is ideal for Dualit’s Fine Green Tea or Infusion range. If a coffee is prepared following a cup of tea, an Automatic Cooling Purge will reduce the temperature and a Patented Pure Pour® delivers a smooth and consistent flow of espresso with a dense crema.

For local stockists visit www.dualit.com

Fitzroy by Second Nature

Fitzroy by Second Nature painted ranges are synonymous with interesting design elements and the new Fitzroy range is no exception, including a versatile range of features to offer the flexibility to create a classic level of detail or clean, modern lines. With a smooth visual and tactile appeal Fitzroy has the look and feel of a bespoke design, whilst being a very credible and affordable alternative.

For local stockists visit www.sncollection.co.uk or call 01325 505539

Country Images Special Edition 11

FROM OUR FAMILY‌ ‌TO YOURS As a family run, independent business with over 30 years experience we pride ourselves on being able to provide a fully personalised and expert service which is unrivalled by larger retailers.

Our extensive showroom boasts an impressive range of kitchens, worktops, bedrooms, tiles and accessories.

Our team of highly experienced designers and installers are here to help with anything from replacing an appliance to a full kitchen or bedroom design and installation.

BEDROOM

SALE

NOW ON

*

www.holtams.co.uk *TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY, SEE IN STORE FOR DETAILS 12 Country Images Special Edition

SUMMER

Kitchen & Bedroom specialists Established 1985

SALE

Treat yourself to a new kitchen this SUMMER and choose from the following:

Option 1:

Slide & Hide oven for £99* Option 2:

Range Cooker £99* Option 3:

USA Fridge/ Freezer £99* Option 4:

Quooker boiling tap £99* Option 5:

Our Showroom is NOW OPEN And meets the Governments

Covid-19 Regulations

£1000 towards Granite, Quartz or Corian Kitchen top* *Offer ends 31st of June or whilst stocks last. Book early to avoid disappointment (minimum spend applies)

WHY CHOOSE HOLTAMS?…

“A trusted family business built on a solid reputation”

• Best value for money • Free design and planning service • Quality 18mm colour co-ordinated cabinets • Extensive door styles to choose from • Granite, solid surface and laminate worktops • Latest CAD 3D design software • No pressure selling • Large car park • Experienced friendly designers

www.holtams.co.uk

Random Ridge, Pickard Lane, Heage, Nr Ripley, Derbyshire, DE56 2BD

T: 01773 852683

Open: Monday to Friday - 9am - 5pm Saturday - 9am to 4pm, Sundays - Closed

Country Images Special Edition 13

Holtams Kitchen & Bedroom specialistsLtd

Random Ridge Random Ridge, Pickard Lane,Pickard Heage, Lane Belper, Derbyshire, DE56Heage, 2BD Belper Derbyshire Tel: 01773 852683 Fax: 01773 856415 enquiries@holtams.co.ukDE56 2BD Tel: 01773 852683 Fax: 01773 856415 enquiries@holtams

Dear Customers,

Dear Customers,

th of May warehouse and workshop will be re From Monday the 11 From Monday the 11th of May our warehouse andour workshop will be reopenalso possible to phone to theand showroom ing. It will also be be possible to phone throughthrough to the showroom access will and access will b an on appointment basis. is essential thatahead youtoring ahead to advis be available an appointmentonly only basis.

It isItessential that you ring advise usconfirm of and confirm any potential showroom visit, this is because we will any potential showroom visit, this is because we will not be fu

not be fully staffed.

that we will be operating strict hand cleansing a Please note thatPlease we will benote operating strict hand cleansing and social distancing the showroom.

You will be asked and e controls at thedistancing showroom. Youcontrols will be askedatand expected to comply with these during any visit. comply with these during any visit.

We’re looking to restart our installation services from Monday the 18th of May. We’re to restartprecautions our installation from Monday the 18th Again, we will be looking taking all appropriate when we’reservices delivering to we will be taking all appropriate precautions when we’re delivering to and working in customer’s homes.

customer’s homes.

We’d like to thank all our customers for their support and cooperation during this difficult and uncertain time.

We’d like to thank all our customers for their support and cooperation Regards,difficult and uncertain time.

Graham Holtam Regards, Holtam GrahamGraham Holtam Managing Director

Managing Director

14 Country Images Special Edition

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We go one better than a free trial, County Images app is always free to download, so get it now and read every Country Images Magazine on your smart phone or tablet today. Just another reason we’re Derbyshire’s best read lifestyle magazine!

or visit www.countryimagesmagazine.co.uk Country Images Special Edition 15

EMPORIUM Porter Dove Grey

by Second Nature

Responding to the strong and ongoing consumer demand for gloss finishes in the kitchen, the new soft grey tone of Porter is firmly on trend in the colour stakes. The new grey tone is anticipated to have widespread appeal as it also blends effortlessly into living areas in open-plan schemes. This range includes a wide range of door and drawer combinations including the narrow letterbox glazed feature door, which is particularly suited to smaller kitchen designs.

For local stockists visit www.sncollection.co.uk or call 01325 505539

A taste of style Metallic Anthracite by Caple

Ultra modern and visually striking, the Metallic Anthracite kitchen from cabinetry specialist Caple is a show-stopping high-gloss design that could create the centerpiece in any contemporary home.

Featuring a combination of dark, brushed aluminium and gloss surfaces, this chic kitchen truly has the wow factor with lasered matching or two-toned gloss edges to the doors. The gloss finish also helps to bounce light around the room, creating a feeling of space, which will help smaller kitchens appear bigger.

For local stockists visit www.caple.co.uk or call 0117 9381900

EL13 AMP by Esse

The EL 13 Amp has been designed to offer the ‘best of both’ in every possible sense. It has ESSE’s classic cast iron construction, heavy duty ovens, beautiful enamelling and the reassuring ‘solidity’ of our classic range cookers...all with modern, electric controllability and responsiveness.

For local stockists visit www.esse.com

16 Country Images Special Edition

EMPORIUM

A taste of style

Malako by Caple

Contemporary and classic design elements are combined to stunning effect in the new Malako kitchen from award-winning kitchen specialist Caple.

This latest addition to the Elements collection features sleek and refined Shakerstyle doors, for a traditional feel, while the bright white finish and curved doors add a modern edge that will lift any kitchen.

For local stockists visit www.caple.co.uk or call 0117 9381900

Storage Jars by Kilner

Pebble Grey, Morning Mist and Moonlight grey. They feature the distinctive Kilner logo on the front and also a ‘limited edition’ backstamp. Size of each is 155mm x 100mm x100mm. For local stockists visit www. kilnerjar.co.uk or call 0151 486 1888

SXS Fridge Freezer by Rangemaster

With ice and filtered water available at the touch of a button, the new SXS American style fridge freezer from Rangemaster will be a family favourite. Available in stainless steel, cream or black, this fridge freezer is packed with features including Quick Cool and Quick Freeze for efficient chilling down of food, a holiday mode the turns the fridge off without affecting the freezer, smart glass shelves with a stainless steel trim, a spacious salad drawer and deep door balconies in the fridge section and a door alarm.

For local stockists visit www.rangemaster.co.uk or call 0800 8046261 Country Images Special Edition 17

“Based in our convenient Belper office or conducting meetings over video call, with Peak Mortgages and Protection you will have access to our exclusive range of lenders and insurers, providing mortgages and protection that can’t be found on the high street. And you’ll get advice you can understand and trust – no-nonsense, straight talking and jargon free. Just like us.

From the first time you contact us you will have your own personal advisor who will work with you to recommend the most appropriate solution for you and manage everything through all the way to completion.

We understand that life changes and we are here to help you every step of the way.

Plus we’re excellent at what we do with the most 5 star Google Reviews in Belper as well as being shortlisted for Top Protection Broker at the 2020 British Mortgage Awards.

To use us simply find Peak Mortgages and Protection on Facebook, Instagram or Google and get in touch. We’ll take it from there.”

18 Country Images Special Edition

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YOUR HOME MAY BE REPOSSESSED IF YOU DO NOT KEEP UP REPAYMENTS ON YOUR MORTGAGE. Country Images Special Edition 19

Three Gardens in South Wales

By Brian Spencer

The coal barons of South Wales made their wealth from the sweat of miners delving deep beneath the wild moors of the Rhondda and surrounding valleys.

The waste from their efforts was built into synthetic mountains of glistening slag that eventually snuffed out the lives of innocent children.

S

ome of the mansions paid for by this quest for coal have disappeared or are now in public hands. Due to the kind climate along the South Wales coastal strip, many of their gardens and parks have since developed into exquisite botanical gardens, where choice plants can grow with only the need for minimal shelter. We visited three of these, ranging from the St Fagans Castle at Cardiff, with its collection of reconstructed rural houses, to the National Botanical Gardens close by the Waun Las National Nature Reserve.

St Fagans Standing a little way outside Cardiff, St Fagans castle was the holiday home of Lord Windsor where royalty and the great and the good were liberally entertained. Built on Norman foundations the castle is still very much as it was when shooting parties took their ease. Opened to the public in 1948, St Fagans is in two parts, the castle and its gardens and parkland developed as a Heritage Museum.

20 Country Images Special Edition

The mansion is surrounded by the remains of the original Norman castle’s outer wall. It gives ample protection to the flower beds and glass houses of an Italianate garden, where, on our visit, two ladies who should have been at work inside the castle were enjoying a craftily extended lunch break – and who could blame them? The castle sits on top of rising ground where the west-facing slope is terraced with rose beds and perennial flowers. Below them lies a series of narrow formal ponds, originally supplying fresh water fish to the household. Tucked away at one end is a working woollen mill making colourful Welsh shawls Trees shade the rest of the park where paths wander around reconstructed old buildings, brought in, with National Heritage funding, from all over rural Wales. They range from a red-walled farmhouse that originally stood at Kennixton on the Gower - it was painted red to ward off evil spirits, to a restored 1940s pre-fab. In between are rows of miners’ cottages, and a working men’s institute, but the real eye opener is St Teilo’s church. From the outside it looks just like a typical Welsh chapel, but the inside gives its

GENERAL INTERESTS

Clog maker St Fagans Heritage Park

St Fagans Castle true age. When it was brought from Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, restorers were amazed when they removed the interior white wash, to find that it was full of pre-Reformation wall paintings. These have since been carefully restored, bringing the church back to the life it led before 1530. Far from being dull reconstructions, many of the buildings are still working in their original form and you can watch a clog maker at work, or marvel at the strength of a blacksmith and enjoy freshly baked bread and bara bryth, Welsh fruit cake.

Singleton Park- Swansea Botanical Gardens The gardens, fill what was once the kitchen garden of an estate owned by the Vivian family. Although the house is long-gone, the gardens and surrounding parkland are very much as they would have been in its splendour. Landscaped in the nineteenth century, the park is popular with dog walkers and joggers from the nearby university campus.

Whilst we enjoyed a stroll around the park, we were mainly interested in Country Images Special Edition 21

exploring the gardens, Swansea’s botanical collection. Small by comparison with say Kew, it is mainly an intimate collection of the sort of plants that will thrive in the local environment. Herbaceous flowers, rare shrubs, alpines and vegetables all flourish happily in an attractive setting; glass houses protect tender orchids and weirdly shaped cactus.

It was during my wander around the freshly planted flower beds that I spotted what I suspected to be a great rarity. There was a gardener working nearby so I asked him what it was – plants are deliberately not labelled in order to detract people from stealing cuttings. His answer was ‘a conifer’.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘I know it’s a pine, but what variety?’ ‘Don’t know was the reply’.

But he called over to a more knowledgeable colleague who confirmed my suspicions. It was a Wollemi Pine from Australia, a tree that was only known from fossilised remains until it was found a decade or so ago in some remote Australian out-back valley. Cuttings sent to Kew have been propagated and sold on as a fund raising venture. This I was told, was one of just two growing in South Wales, where, apparently they are doing quite nicely thank you.

One of the nice things about Singleton Park is that volunteers are 22 Country Images Special Edition

Waun Las a National Nature Reserve

encouraged to help run the garden. Wandering into the propagating shed we chatted to groups of ladies busy pricking out seedlings, or working nearby sorting out plants damaged in recent storms – what an excellent idea don’t you think?

The National Botanic Garden of Wales Here is another garden sitting amidst a one-time wealthy lord’s parkland.

Set in rolling hills beyond Swansea on the road to Carmarthen, the garden is a wealth of ideas and innovative suggestions to amaze even the most experienced gardener.

The park and land thereabouts surrounded the Paxton family’s Middleton Hall. Although not related to the great Sir Joseph Paxton of Chatsworth fame, nevertheless they were keen gardeners and had the grounds landscaped in 1793/5 by Samuel Pepys Cockerell (again no relation to the diarist). In 1825 the estate was sold to the Hughes family who lived there until 1925. A fire in 1931 demolished the hall and apart from use during the last war, the park became neglected until it was taken over by Swansea Corporation and developed as a botanical garden.

The park itself is called Waun Las, a National Nature Reserve where paths wander through acres of wildflower meadows, or pass, curiously interested cattle. The gardens themselves are in and around a double-walled enclosure, where even the keenest winds fail to reach. It is here that we explored collections of the weirdest edible plants that grow in Britain – such as chick peas, and did you know that dahlia roots are edible?

Seven lakes which seem to be flowing the wrong way surround the garden.

Lined by interesting water features contrasting with slate beds, they lead on to the double-walled garden. Beyond is the old stable block now a restaurant and art gallery, and then to the right a path climbs to a huge geo-dome with its collection of subtropical plants from all over the world.

Outside and oddly positioned, for it is not where the original hall once stood, is the scaled down outline plan of what it looked like.

The only way to really enjoy a garden such as this is to wander round and find the oddest or most interesting things. Where else for example would one find a collection of uprooted African trees with roots looking like some Medusa’s hair-style? And to cap it all we came across a most life-like bull made from leather stuffing inside a wire frame.

Country Images Special Edition 23

IMAGES OF

SOME ISLANDS IN THE CHANNEL

By Brian Spencer

F

lying to Guernsey a month or so ago could not have been more hassle free. Getting to East Midlands Airport meant simply catching the 08:30 a.m. TP bus from Matlock to Derby, then the every twenty minute service from there to the airport. Time for a leisurely coffee before check-in followed by a late breakfast/early lunch before our Aurigny Air flight at five minutes past one – dead easy!

We stayed in St Peter Port, Guernsey’s ‘capital’, an ideal base for exploring the island and its smaller neighbours. The street pattern is made up of narrow winding ways, laid out in Georgian times. At least that is how it appears from the date of houses around Hautville, where the Pandora Hotel was right next door to the house where exiled Victor Hugo wrote part of les Miserables.

24 Country Images Special Edition

Walking is a popular pastime with both visitors and locals alike. Most of the possible excursions on Guernsey, are along the steep cliffs around the south part of the island, whilst sandy bays sliced by rocky outcrops, feature on the lower lying north-western part. Ferries also ply daily to the outlying islands of Sark and Herm, making them easily accessible.

We had thought about trying to reach Alderney and in fact there was a ferry advertised, but when we went to enquire we were enigmatically told that it was cancelled – for ‘political reasons’ what ever that could be. Not to be daunted and as we were already on the quay where a ferry was about to leave for Sark, we opted for the alternative. Passing close to the tiny island of Brecqhou, fortress home of the reclusive Barclay twins, owners of the Daily Telegraph, an island where visitors are certainly unwelcome. We arrived at Sark’s cliff-bound little harbour. There was transport waiting for anyone with luggage, or in need of a lift to the higher centre of the island. Cars simply do not exist on Sark, the only form of transport is tractor driven for anything heavy, or horse-drawn traps for pedestrians – a much slower pace of life and all the better for it.

The island’s volunteer fire brigade was practicing cliff rescue techniques.

Apparently (‘touch wood’, as the man in charge said), fires are rare, but they do have to look after the odd tourist or sheep that get into difficulties wandering too far out on to the cliffs. In keeping with the car-free policy of

the island, the bright red mini-fire engine was a home-made affair based on odds and ends such as a tractor engine, or wheels salvaged from a London bus. Leaving them to their Tarzan inspired activities, we set off round the south coast of the main part of the island, through fields totally free of chemical fertilisers; the proximity to France was made obvious by a small south facing vineyard.

I have long been fascinated by a publicity photograph of a road across a narrow ridge on Sark. This is la Coupée, a slender track sitting on top of a knife-edge between two bays, that will one day cut off Little Sark from its

big sister. The road was built by a detachment of the Royal Engineers and German P.O.Ws in 1945, a fantastic piece of road building that is quite unsuitable for anyone who suffers from vertigo.

Working our way back to the harbour we passed a cottage where a sign told us that the ‘witch was home’. Who she was we hadn’t the courage to find out, but she seems to be typical of the sturdy character of the Sark islanders. A couple of A4 closely typed documents in a shop window in the main street, spoke of an on-going battle between one of the residents and the Barclay brothers; but one can only hope he has enough cash to cover any resulting

Guernsey - Cliff walks, quiet beeches and historical ports.

Country Images Special Edition 25

litigation. An island with a population measured in hundreds, boasts a rare golden Royal Mail post box. It commemorates Carl Hester winning an equestrian gold in the 2012 Olympics.

Guernsey like the rest of the Channel Islands was the only part of Britain to be over-run by the Nazis during World War 2. For some reason Hitler thought Churchill might try to reclaim the islands, a military impossibility, when considered beside the need to invade mainland Europe. In fact Guernsey was not liberated until the day after VE Day in 1945. Undeterred, Hitler decided to fortify the islands as part of his Atlantic War. Using slave labour the Germans built huge fortifications, many looking like Henry Moore sculptures. Fortifications that never fired a shot in anger were not new to Guernsey, for dotted around its coast are cylindrical Martello towers dating from the Napoleonic Wars. St Peter Port is also guarded by the impenetrable ramparts of Castle Cornet where the tiny garrison still fires a noon-day cannon.

The other easily accessible nearby island is Herm. Like most of the region it was totally evacuated in 1940, but never taken over by the invaders. For years the castaway island paradise lay uninhabited until two couples set about restoring the storm ravaged houses and opening Herm to visitors. Since 2008 the island has been owned by a Mr and Mrs Singer who have vowed

Above left and right: Victor Hugo’s house on Guernsey.

26 Country Images Special Edition

Below: The slender track separating Sark from Little Sark.

to keep the island as a quiet retreat for all to enjoy. They are not the first settlers though to come to Herm. St Tugual had a hermitage on the island said to be where the tiny parish church now stands. Herm’s coastline can be explored by an easy four mile walk. It follows the rugged granite cliffs of the south to la Pointe, the northern tip before returning to the harbour. Bays of uncluttered golden sands and strategically placed kiosks selling local ice cream compete with masses of wildflowers in an attempt to distract the truly happy wanderer. A word of warning to anyone planning a visit to Herm; due to the exceptionally high tides in the area, ferries frequently have to call at different places on their outward or return journeys. The two points, Village Harbour and Rosière Steps are only a short distance apart, but could create problems for anyone on the last minute.

One thing that puzzled me was the number of derelict commercial greenhouses on Guernsey. Like many, I well remember the flavoursome Guernsey tomatoes that arrived every spring. Sadly they are more or less long gone, the victim of two attacks; the first was the fuel subsidy Dutch growers enjoy, but the final death-knell came from no less than Doctor Beeching’s railway axe. Apparently the ferries between mainland Britain and the Channel Islands were run by British Rail and as they were frequently returning empty, the clever doctor deemed them uneconomical. So along with many rural branch lines, they were axed, cutting off the tomato growers’ life line. Those who survived now grow cut flowers or out of season vegetables.

Almost France.

Having ploughed through the 1232 pages of my paperback version of les Miserables, I was delighted to be so near his house.

It is run by a Paris-based organisation not unlike our National Trust and the Tricolour flies proudly above the doorway. Luckily we decided to visit the house in the early morning, arriving on the stroke of 10:00 am, just in time before the door was closed until the next tour an hour later. Victor Hugo retreated to Guernsey as an exile for not supporting the Napoleon III and set about converting the three-storied town house with a curious mixture of styles ranging from Jacobean to ancient Chinese. The result has some strange additions, such as a door made from Jacobean panelling that has been turned through ninety degrees, or a candelabra that uses bobbins for candle holders.

There is absolutely no reason to take or hire a car, because the island has buses running to almost every remote corner. We used them with their quirky one pound per journey fare no matter how long it may be. The first time was on an up and down cliff walk to the south of the island on a day of thick sea mist when the mournful sound of the fog horn on St Martin’s Point guided us on our way. In complete contrast, the other walk was to explore eight sandy bays in the north of the island. These are the cleanest sands you could ever see, not a trace of rubbish and every one seemed to have an inviting kiosk selling freshly made crab sandwiches.

Sark transport.

The National Trust has a small presence on Guernsey, a Victorian shop in St Peter Port and Saumarez Park in the north. We visited the latter on our last day, mainly to see the Folk and Costume Museum. Set inside the old stable block of Saumarez House, it is a small collection of by-gone industrial and agricultural artefacts, easily spaced amongst interpretive displays. Did you know that there is also a Guernsey sweater? Each main island apparently had its own design, but the word jersey seems to have stuck, rather like hoover and biro.

Brian booked his trip through Slacks of Matlock who act as agents for Travelsmith, specialists in Channel Islands tours.

Georgian street layout - St Peter Port.

Country Images Special Edition 27

LADY ARBELLA STUART Derbyshire’s would-be Queen of England

By Brian Spencer

H

ardwick Hall – ‘More Window than Wall’ was four-times married Bess of Hardwick’s crowning masterpiece. An ambitious woman whose successive marriages had left her the richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth I. She planned her ‘New House’ at Hardwick to be a palace fit for the Queen of England; this Queen was to be her own granddaughter.

Arbella Stuart as a young woman 28 Country Images Special Edition

In 1574 Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, brother of Lord Darnley the late husband of Mary Queen of Scots and therefore of royal blood, became ill whilst staying at Hardwick Old Hall. Seeing an opportunity, Bess, Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess of Shrewsbury, saw to it that her unmarried daughter also called Elizabeth, would care for him during

Hardwick Hall ‘More Window than Wall’

his illness. The poor man had little chance and young Elizabeth became Countess of Lennox.

The result of this union was a girl born at Chatsworth, who was christened at Edensor church in 1575. Unfortunately the couple both died quite young and there were no more of Bess’s grandchildren in line to become potential claimants to the throne. Undaunted Bess took over the education of young Arbella, keeping her ever close while living at Chatsworth or Hardwick.

The education Arbella received must have been of a very high standard for the time, because from letters she wrote it appears that she was a highly intelligent young woman.

During this time, unmarried Queen Elizabeth was vacillating over who should be her successor, but let it drop in private that she might name Arbella as the rightful heir to become the next queen. This delighted Lady Arbella Stuart, but it seems to have gone to her head and despite her

grandmother’s strict upbringing, she put on many airs and graces, insisting that the servants at Chatsworth and Hardwick deferred to her as ‘Your Highness’.

Possibly due in part to Arbella’s attitude, relations with her grandmother became rather strained and she was kept virtually as a prisoner at the newly built Hardwick Hall. Fortunately for the girl, in 1587 she received the welcome invitation to spend time at the court of Elizabeth I. Unfortunately Arbella’s stay at court was not exactly a happy occasion.

Rather than play the demure young thing, finding her way into Queen Elizabeth’s approval, she continued her northern ways in having everyone referring to her as though she were already the queen’s anointed successor.

Further more she decided that it was time to get married and, rather than wait for the queen’s approval, allowed discussions of marriage to Raunutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma to take place. As the marriage would Country Images Special Edition 29

Lady Arbella Stuart as a child

Arbella in middle age have been to a Catholic and with Queen Elizabeth the country’s leading Protestant, it was hardly likely to gain royal approval. Luckily the Duke of Parma died shortly afterwards, leaving all plans of marriage for Arbella on hold and at least it avoided her becoming too much of an embarrassment in royal circles.

in order to replace King James with Catholic Lady Arbella. Obviously she could be seen as a dangerous threat to James’ security, but luckily for her as it would have been easy to have had her executed, all that happened was that she was banished from court.

In 1662 back at Hardwick Hall and still longing for marriage, Arbella began to plot on her own account. This time it was to marry Edward Seymour, the eldest grandson of the Earl of Hertford and Catherine Grey who was also a claimant to the English throne. As Arbella was again Bess’s prisoner at Hardwick, she had to plot her escape, but got no further than the gatehouse, and so her plans came to nothing yet again. All this angered Queen Elizabeth who ordered that Arbella should be removed from the now ageing Bess’ care and taken to live under the protection of the Earl of Kent.

Five years after his coronation, King James welcomed Lady Arbella Stuart back at court, but on June 22nd 1610 at Greenwich she secretly married William Seymour, the youngest brother of Edward Seymour whom she had tried to marry eight years earlier. This created a most dangerous situation for King James, because not only was Arbella a Stuart, but William was a direct descendant of the Tudor dynasty by way of his aunts, the sisters of Henry VIII. With their marriage a direct threat to the King, the couple were forced to separate and Arbella was put in the care of Sir Thomas Perry at his house in Lambeth. William was imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 with her successor undecided. Despite Lady Arbella’s stronger rights, Protestant King James VI of Scotland was made James the First of England and Ireland. This was a far from popular move and various insurrections including the Gunpowder Plot, were attempted

Somehow or other the couple managed to make plans to escape, with Arbella disguised as a man. Their planned escape route was to meet at Lee in Kent and sail together to France. Both were successful in evading their captors, but Arbella reached the rendezvous before William and set

30 Country Images Special Edition

One of Bess’s tapestries

Hardwick Hall: a palace fit for the Queen of England

Above: Bess of Hardwick Below: Queen Elizabeth

sail without him. William was also successful and sailed for France on a separate ship. Despite William landing successfully at Ostend, Arbella was apprehended by the King’s men in Calais and speedily returned to England where she was held in the Tower of London.

Following an unsuccessful attempt to escape, Arbella became ill and refused food; later on she began to lose her mind, thinking William was coming to her rescue. During this time she kept to her bed and on September 27th 1615 she died and was buried just a day later in Westminster Abbey, on top of Mary Queen of Scots. Thus ended the unhappy life of a young woman who, under different circumstance could have been a Derbyshire born Queen of England.

Currently there is an exhibition devoted to the complex life of Lady Arbella Stuart, at Hardwick Hall (National Trust). Running alongside there is also an exhibition of embroidery associated with Bess of Hardwick who was a skilled embroiderer, at one time working alongside Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment in Derbyshire.

Country Images Special Edition 31

Statue commemorating Irish emigrants

Merseyside’s Maritime History

Liverpool and Birkenhead have seen many changes since their heyday of shipping, but as Brian Spencer found out, there are still many links with their maritime history.

If you could go back to the mid to late 1800s, the whole of the Mersey estuary would have been full of ships carrying goods in and out of Liverpool; there would be crowds waiting on the quayside hoping to welcome Irish immigrants, or saying farewell to emigrants looking west for a more prosperous life beyond our shores. Across the river, Cammel Laird’s and lesser shipyards would be noisy with the clamouring sound of riveters stitching together massive sea-going vessels.

All that activity has gone; no longer does Cammel Laird make the likes of Shell Oil’s Scythia, the largest ship to slide down into the Mersey since the Arc Royal was built by Cammel Laird. There is still some ship repair work, but the numbers employed are a fraction of those who built the steam ships of yesteryear.

Many of the ships built on Merseyside lie rusting on the bottom of the ocean, victims of the battle of the Atlantic during World War 2. The battle against the U-Boat menace was co-ordinated there and so it is a fitting tribute to remember the men who fought and died in order to bring desperately needed supplies to our shores. That tribute is uniquely remembered by the preserved sections of U-534, sunk whilst trying to escape 32 Country Images Special Edition

through the Kattegat Straits off Denmark on 5th May 1945, in disobedience of Grand Admiral Doenitz’s order to surrender.

The position of where U-534 was sunk by an RAF Liberator bomber ‘G’ for George, was well known, but why it was sailing on the surface in complete disobedience of its orders was unknown. As a result a number of myths grew around the story of its final days.

As the submarine had an exceptionally long range capability there was the possibility that it was carrying a top ranking Nazi escaping to Argentina; another suggestion was that it was carrying a huge amount of bullion and diamonds destined to finance a Fourth Reich.

With the possibility of rich treasure, a Danish

businessman Karsten Ree financed an expedition to raise the vessel, which could not be classed as a war grave because most of the crew escaped the stricken vessel. Unfortunately for Ree and his team, there was nothing of value on board, but there were thirteen torpedoes and 450 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition, all in a dangerous condition. What to do with the submarine was sorted, when it was decided to present it to Merseyside, as this was the most important Allied port during the war. Cut into sections for easy viewing, it now sits beside Woodside Ferry Terminal at Birkenhead.

As the Gerry and the Pacemakers’ song says Ferry Cross the Mersey, this is the best way to reach Liverpool’s waterfront. As recently as 1970 the

Ferry Cross the Mersey

docks teemed with ships coming and going to all points of the globe. At that time loading and unloading was mainly done by hand, taking days or even weeks to carry out this back-breaking form of manual labour. All this came to an end with the (in retrospect), simple invention of the container. With this invention, goods would be loaded or unloaded at factories and warehouses, carried directly to and from the ship and loaded within minutes of arrival. Another advantage of this scheme was that ships could be ever larger and as a result the cramped docks lining Liverpool’s waterfront soon became totally inadequate. With the development of a new container port at Bootle directly linked to the motorway network, Liverpool’s old docks and warehouses soon became industrial slums. Even

We all live in a Yellow Submarine

Country Images Special Edition 33

the Irish ferries that once sailed from Pier Head now go from Birkenhead.

Rather than simply fill the complex of interlinked basins and demolishing the massive warehouses, where goods once waited weeks for a convenient ship, the whole area has been developed into a pedestrian friendly walkway, behind the riverside quays. Many of the warehouses are now highly desirable apartments with views far better than anything in London’s dockland. Their ground floors are given over to shops and restaurants, making the transfer of use a perfect answer to a potentially difficult problem. There is plenty of water-borne activity going on in the old docks, from self pedalled ‘swans’ to a bizarre trio of boats offering overnight accommodation. If you wish, you can rent the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, or stay on the sinking Titanic.

Liverpool, a main port of call for ships cruising around the British Isles.

Liverpool is well off for art galleries and museums, but the addition of the newly built Liverpool Story, beside Albert Dock, compliments the earlier centres of history and art. Here as the name suggests, you can trace the history of the city port, through all its problems and successes. Next door is the Tate Gallery of modern art.

Now that Liverpool has become a major attraction, it is a main port of call for tall ships and boats cruising round the British Isles. Fred Olsen’s Black Watch III was in port on our visit and the Three Queens cruise liners will be calling soon.

The Liver Building

Fred Olsen’s Black Watch III humour says that the two mythical birds that top the building are male and female; the one overlooking the river is looking for her lover’s ship and the cock to the rear is waiting for the pubs to open.

One of the advantages of the waterfront restoration is that the magnificent oncecommercial buildings are now set off at their architectural best. Backed by imaginative eyecatching new developments, the likes of the Liver Building is a statement to Liverpool’s ongoing maritime success story. Typical Liverpool 34 Country Images Special Edition

During the peak of Manchester’s textile manufacturing success, cotton bales were often taking weeks to travel from Liverpool.

Furthermore shipping agents were charging ever increasingly exorbitant fees for the doubtful service. As a result it was decided to make Manchester into an inland port, by building a canal direct from the Mersey estuary. Led by a far sighted engineer Daniel Adamson, a canal part financed by Manchester Corporation, was cut from sea level at Eastham on the south bank of the Mersey estuary. It climbed the 60 foot rise to the city by a series of locks designed to take large or smaller vessels in order to save water; that water came from the rivers Irwell and Mersey, mainly the later which flowed conveniently close to the proposed route of the canal. As the canal cut through several rights of way, bridges had

to be built and in one case where it crossed a footpath. A passenger ferry rowing boat that still operates today, crosses the canal at Thelwall.

Until its demise with the advent of container shipping, Manchester docks were frequently almost jammed solid with ocean-going ships carrying goods to and from Cottonopolis.

During the war it also served as a place where small warships could call for minor repairs. My cousin served on a corvette during this time and along with a number of the crew was a Mancunian. They were therefore delighted by their unexpected break from the dangers of convoy protection and spent their free time at home. Once the work was complete the order to set sail was given. Unfortunately someone forgot to untie one of the mooring lines and half the deck was ripped off giving the crew a bit more time for shore leave.

Today a surprising number of ships still use the canal, from tankers in and out of Stanlow refinery to the Guinness boat sailing direct from Dublin

The historic Edmund Gardner pilot ship, painted in a modern version of dazzle camouflage.

into Manchester. The water is clean enough to support wildlife and the spot where my cousin’s ship was embarrassingly delayed is now part of the Imperial War Museum North. Across the unchanged outlines of the old docks of Salford Quays is Media City, northern home for the BBC and ITV; opposite them is the Lowry Centre with its theatres, restaurants and art gallery.

It is still possible to travel as a passenger between Liverpool and Manchester. The almost daily service is operated by Mersey Ferries, by using one of their sturdy fleet of cross river ferries. All are named after spring flowers, Iris, Daffodil and Snowdrop. The two former vessels, Iris and Daffodil, carry the pre-fix ‘Royal’. It was given

by King George V in recognition of the original boat’s heroic involvement as troop carriers in the audacious attack on Zeebrugge harbour in 1918. Snowdrop is currently painted in jazzy psychedelic stripes in an art form based on a World War One scheme designed to confuse u-boat commanders.

Snowdrop in her psychedelic paint job.

Country Images Special Edition 35

NOTTINGHAM

Galleries of Just ice

I

n his third visit to Nottingham’s historical features, Brian Spencer finds that although the Galleries of Justice are not exactly suitable for anyone a touch squeamish, it gives a fascinating insight to the way crime and punishment were dealt with not all that long ago.

In order to experience what it would have been for a criminal coming to face justice, the scene was set as soon as we bought our entry ticket. Like every other visitor, we were given a number relating to a real person who had been tried within the intimidating precincts of Nottingham’s Shire Hall. Mine was of a man who was transported to Van Dieman’s Land for the so-called crime of stealing food for his starving family.

As with every criminal being tried, we entered the first stage of his or her journey into punishment, which began in the polished wooden surroundings of the courtroom. This is where the accused would be brought up from the dungeonlike cells directly into the dock. On all sides would be the panoply of justice, the twelve members of the jury, lawyers both for the prosecution and defence, court reporters, press, 36 Country Images Special Edition

Inside the cells

The court room friends of the accused and if the trial had sufficient notoriety, members of the public seeking a cheap thrill. Towering above all this, resplendent in his scarlet robes and wig, the judge would be seated directly below the monarch’s coat of arms, signifying the fact that he was acting as the dispenser of royal justice.

Several famous cases were tried in this courtroom: in 1935 Nurse Waddingham was convicted of murder by poisoning two of her elderly patients for financial gain. Buster Edwards the last of the Great Train Robbers was sentenced to 15 years in jail after giving himself up on 19th September 1966. On 24th November 1977, Chris Seale the manager of a Virgin music shop was tried under the Indecent Advertisement Act for displaying the Sex Pistols’ album in his shop window. After a highly publicised trial he was acquitted in what became a major shift in the law on indecency.

Some of the photographs of the prisoners

We then followed the route of a convicted criminal, down the steep wooden stairs into the dungeon-like surroundings of the cells deep beneath the massive structure of the Grade II listed building. Here we were greeted by the frighteningly realistic gaoler who explained in no uncertain terms what we could expect. Accommodation at first would be in a dank airless cell with the only light coming from a tiny barred window high on one wall. The bed if it could be called thus was a canvas sheet tautly stretched between two walls of the narrow cell. Timid enquiries about the lack of blankets were answered by a laugh. Any comforts such as blankets, heating or food, better than the thin gruel and water on offer, had to be bought. Naturally this could be provided, at a cost, by the gaoler into whose pockets payments went and of course the more you paid him, the easier would be your conditions whilst in his care.

Country Images Special Edition 37

The gallows

Entrance from the street Life in prison was once built around total incarceration, poor food, lack of fresh air and hard work. The only contact a prisoner could have with his fellow inmates was during the daily trudge around the exercise yard and then any verbal contact was rigorously monitored. At other times when prison disciple became lax, there was more freedom to wander about and chat amongst themselves, but this was soon stamped out. During the time of harsher regime weekly divine services were held when there would be no contact whatever and all the prisoners could do was listen to the pious outpourings of the prison chaplain.

Women had slightly better living conditions than men, and they were mostly employed in the prison laundry. Not for them the luxury of mechanical aids – everything was lifted and tugged by hand in a room full of steam with soapsuds and water ankle deep. Until the beginning of the twentieth century children were treated the same way as adults, given scaled-down versions of grown-ups’ prison uniforms and kept in jail for months at a time, often for the simplest of crimes. Even so prison was sometimes considered the milder option to the reformatories that had opened in the mid 1900s.

Then as now, men made up the bulk of the prison population, but unlike now, debtors were included, albeit segregated from outright criminals.

Debtors who could afford to pay were given the best rooms, often with a 38 Country Images Special Edition

More prisoners fireplace and an oven. Those with few, if any available amounts of cash, were housed in just two rooms of the prison. These contained anything of up to twenty persons at a time, all living in the most unsanitary conditions where jail fever, better known as typhoid, was rife. All prisoners felons and debtors alike were locked in their cells between 8pm and 8am.

Any prisoner who broke the rules could expect swift and frequently painful retribution. They could be put in one of the two dark cramped underground cells, existing on a diet of bread and water. Whipping was considered good for the soul for anyone breaking prison discipline The everyday diet was not much better than the bread and water punishment diet. Breakfast consisted of a pint of oatmeal gruel and 8oz of coarse bread. Dinner was the most substantial meal of the day and consisted of 4oz cooked meat, one pound of potatoes and 6oz bread. Supper prior to lights out was a repeat of the breakfast menu.

Prior to 1865, prisoners were literally locked away for the duration of their sentence, but from then on a more structured regime took over. Men would be put to work on shoemaking, tailoring and joiners’ work. As an alternative to laundry work, women did sewing and cleaning. Oakum picking was used as a form of hard labour and it involved unpicking old tarred ex-navy rope into single strands of thread, an early form of recycling. There was also a

Part of the ‘black’ museum

Laundry run by the female prisoners pointless form of punishment, such as the crank where a handle had to be turned anything up to 10,000 times day to drive a paddle surrounded by stones inside a metal box. Another was the treadwheel where prisoners spent countless hours on the never ending steps of a treadle wheel.

Following the efforts of nineteenth century prison reformers such as Elizabeth Fry, conditions began to improve marginally. Inmates were allowed pencils and slates in 1850 and gas lighting was introduced to Nottingham goal in 1853. The intention behind this innovation was to give prisoners the opportunity to read and work in their cells. A decent place to wash was also created by using part of the old female section of the prison and prison uniforms meant clothing would be relatively lice free.

There are complete records of Nottingham people who were sentenced to transportation to the colonies. On a brick in the exercise yards are the crude letters of Valentine Marshall’s name. Aged 17 in 1832 he was accused of setting fire to Colwick Hall during the Reform Bill riots. Unlike all too many, he survived the four moth long journey to Hobart in Tasmania where he seems to have been able to make a successful life for himself. Awarded a free pardon in 1842 he married, had seven children and spent the rest of his life as a moderately prosperous nurseryman.

Despite improvements, the County Goal was inadequate and in constant need of repair. Frequently being criticised for its inability to modernise, the final nail in its coffin was the passing of the Prison Act in 1877, that laid down standards the place was unable to reach. On 1st April 1878, Nottingham Prison closed its doors as the last prisoner was removed to Southwell House of Correction. During its last four months there were 67 punishments in the dark cell, 53 stoppages of diets and one whipping.

Although the prison closed, the courtrooms and police station continued to be used until 1986, after which the abandoned buildings became derelict. Since 1995 the Nottingham Galleries of Justice have been run by the Egalitarian Trust established to promote equal opportunity for all by the understanding of the law. The Trust has two divisions which work in partnership. The Galleries of Justice Museum interprets the social history of crime and punishment through its exhibitions and tours; the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law (NCCL) aims to create social change through learning about the law. Working with over 15,000 children every year, this work has spread through public education syndicates throughout the East Midlands, London and Manchester.

The Trust also operates the City of Caves, preserving the unique underground history of Nottingham.

Country Images Special Edition 39

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Worcester Credit Installer 10 Years Warranty on all Worcester Boilers Country Images Special Edition 41

WATCH OUT FOR Brian Spencer crosses the sands to visit Lindisfarne, the site of the earliest Christian settlement in England

In the early years of the seventh century, Celtic missionaries were sent from their home priory on Iona to spread the gospel throughout the heathen lands of what later became Scotland and Northumbria. In 635AD the first of these monks, St Aidan made the arduous journey, crossing the sea in a flimsy leather-covered coracle.

Looking for a secure base he chose the island off the east coast later to be known as Holy Island, or Lindisfarne.

42 Country Images Special Edition

T

he island was where he built his oratory, the forerunner of the graceful priory that lasted throughout war and famine, until the edict of King Henry VIII saw its final irrevocable destruction. Roughly the shape of an elongated fish hook and connected to the mainland by a marked route at low tide, Lindisfarne is first and foremost the resting place of countless migratory sea birds. They have the west end of the island to themselves building their nests in the maze of sand dunes. Mankind has the east and southern smaller portion, where better land, both for grazing and building can be found on a bed of ancient volcanic rock, part of the Great Whin Sill that covers most of the north-east of England.

Gradually St Aidan and his later followers spread the Celtic gospel throughout the north from what originally had been a simple rocky shrine. Soon it was a place of pilgrimage and it was on Lindisfarne that scribes patiently decorated the beautiful accounts of the gospels; works that have survived to this day and are held in the British Library. By using special egg based colours and gold leaf on calf skin vellum, their work is as vibrant today as it was when they put down their pens on the finished work.

For years the monks enjoyed the tranquility and security afforded by their island retreat, but this was soon to be shattered. The year of 793AD was one of fear and terror for all the people living in Anglo-Saxon England. Due to a long spell of particularly bad weather, crops had failed and famine stalked the land. But this was not to be the end of their troubles and, in particular, the monks living on Lindisfarne. As recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, on the 7th June of that same year ‘heathen men came and miserably destroyed God’s church, on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter’.

According to an account by the monk Simon of Durham; ‘They trod the holy things under their polluted feet, they dug down the altars and plundered all the treasures of

VIKINGS the church. Some of the brethren they stripped naked, insulted, and cast out of doors, and some they drowned in the sea’.

This attack on Lindisfarne was just one of a lengthy series of marauding raids carried out by land hungry Vikings. Although the 793AD raid was fully documented, it was just one of many on the ‘soft targets’ of Lindisfarne and others around the coasts of the British Isles. Ranging across the North Sea from Scandinavia in their perfectly designed longboats, they travelled as far as Greenland and Newfoundland to the west and Russia to the east, before settling throughout the North of England and Eastern Ireland.

Skilled craftsmen and boat builders, they gradually changed over the intervening years mellowing from fearsome pirates to respectable traders and farmers.

Prior to the Viking attack, in 664AD St Cuthbert became abbot of Lindisfarne, but being a particularly holy man he preferred to cut himself off from the rest of humanity. Rather than use the priory, he hid himself away from public gaze, on a tiny grassy outcrop a little way off the main island, for days at a time. Later he ventured out to the more remote Inner Fame beyond Seahouses, the largest of the treacherous group of rocky islands known collectively as The Fames. Then as now they were difficult to reach and are still wild bird sanctuaries. Among the many birds nesting there are the eider ducks he especially loved; nowadays they are still known locally as St Cuthbert’s chicks.

St Aidan

Orchid - growing wild on the island Country Images Special Edition 43

From artillery fort to holiday home Lindisfarne Castle

The traditional route to Lindisfarne across the sands.

Gertrude Jekyll’s garden - Lindisfarne Castle 44 Country Images Special Edition

When St Cuthbert died in 687AD he was buried with much pomp at Lindisfarne, but when his tomb was opened eleven years later his body was found to be uncorrupted. Seeing this as an omen from above, and fearing attacks from the sea, the monks decided to move his coffin to a safer place.

This they moved around the north of England for over a hundred years before finding a suitable spot. It became the soaring cathedral of Durham.

The site of St Cuthbert’s original resting place has become a place of pilgrimage, the final stage for walkers along the long distance trail named after him. In its last few miles rather than follow the road by way of the causeway, it takes the more direct and traditional route across the sands by following a line of poles. Today’s visitors be they pilgrims or tourists can still follow much of both Saints Aidan and Cuthbert’s story in the well appointed visitor centre attached to the priory ruins.

Always check the tide tables before visiting Lindisfarne. Never do as we did one dark November night on a visit to the island. Blithely driving down the side road off the Al we were confronted not simply with the sea washing wildly across the causeway, but it was actually on the grass beside the car park — it was a spring tide no less, the highest of them all. All we could do was drive back to Berwick and wait until the River Tweed began to flow out to sea — a lesson learned. Northumberland County Council’s web site gives times when it is safe to cross.

The tranquility of Lindisfarne today Life on Lindisfarne continues to enjoy the sense of tranquility that brought the first monks to the island. Lime is no longer burnt in the kilns below the castle, but the tiny village still provides a home base for fishermen who now mostly specialise in catching lobsters and crabs in the surrounding cold waters of the North Sea. There is just one farm using the lush grazing beyond the village, but it is perhaps catering for the hordes of visitors who cross the causeway at low tide that provides work for the locals.

A grave stone from Lindisfarne depicting a Viking attack.

A Celtic grave marker from Lindisfarne.

Prominent on a rocky outcrop at the southern end of the island, 16th century Lindisfarne castle guards the entrance to the sheltered harbour.

Built in 1530 as an artillery fort and strengthened during the Napoleonic wars, it was bought by Edward Hudson the publisher of ‘Country Life’ in 1880. Using the renowned architect Sir Edward Lutyens, he converted the fort into a comfortable holiday home where he entertained members of the literary society of his day. Missed by many is the ‘Walled Garden’ created by the garden make-over personality of her day, Gertrude Jekyll in 1911. It is a hundred yards or so beyond the castle and is an interesting example of how a garden can be created in defiance of the howling gales sweeping in from the North Sea.

Lindisfarne Abbey Country Images Special Edition 45

Alaska‌ Martin J Founds

of Martins World Travel and fellow adventurer

Chris Tarrant

explore the stunning setting of Lake Clark in southwest Alaska

Martin:

For pure wilderness, amazing wildlife and stunning scenery nowhere on earth quite beats Alaska. A great transport system (air, road and rail) interesting towns with character and history make exploration from the city of Anchorage so easy.

My business is travel and development, my hobbies are fishing, photography and filming. Alaska combines all these perfectly.

After numerous visits I accompanied my fishing friend and fellow adventurer Chris Tarrant to the stunning setting of Lake Clark in southwest Alaska. Our remote but quite luxurious accommodation, Silver Salmon Creek Lodge, could only be accessed by light aircraft using the beach as a landing strip. No roads here!

The lodge is owned by the family that built it, the Corays, and David, Joanne and Oliver Coray run a very professional operation.

About 30 years ago, when principally a fly fishing lodge, the Corays decided to live around some of the worlds largest bears, the Alaskan Coastal Brown Bear. By treating them with respect and deciding 46 Country Images Special Edition

that this was the bears territory, and humans were tolerated guests, a strange and unique situation developed. Guests and bears get along just great as long as certain protocols are adhered to. The lodge staff view this as the bears domain and we are their invited guests. They are never offered food and if we are fishing we always stop and move out to let the bears fish their way. Respect is the keyword. Young and adolescent bears tend to be the most inquisitive. It is critical that you never panic, turn your back or try to run from these bears as your guides will explain.

When I mentioned this unique location to Chris he immediately agreed to join me on what was to be one of the most exciting of my Alaskan visits‌

Chris

Coho, The Silver Salmon which although not so big, are still a tremendous sporting fish and late in the summer the rivers of Alaska are full of them.

The first afternoon we spent walking the fishery with Polaroid glasses

one of the World’s Last Frontiers

and the first creature we saw was breath-taking, it was just enormous it was about ten foot in length with a really thick girth, and a massive back, it wasn’t the Coho to end all Cohoes… this was my first ever encounter with an Alaskan coastal brown bear.

It came wandering out of the woods and walked slowly along the riverbank, directly towards us. My guide, Eric had said “Whatever you do, don’t run, just move back very quietly give him space and he will totally ignore you.” Very difficult advice to follow, as I’m sure you’ll agree, my instinct was to run like hell or climb up the nearest tree and scream for my mummy but bears love climbing trees and can also run surprisingly fast (like 30 mph fast!) So, I had to resort to the “move back and give him space” technique. To my relief and amazement it actually worked, and it kept on working throughout our incredible week.

We caught an enormous number of salmon, all bright silver, fresh from the sea, but we also got up close and personal Country Images Special Edition 47

with a lot of bears, in fact in the end I became far more interested in watching the bears than catching any more salmon.

We watched one very large female bear with three cubs feast on 5 or 6 salmon in a couple of hours, before we went back to an enormous breakfast ourselves. Sometimes a female seemed to leave cubs close to us while she went fishing, I couldn’t get my head around this behaviour at all. But Martin explained that she felt safer leaving the cubs with us rather than risk a big male finding them unattended for the big males would undoubtedly kill and eat any cubs they found.

Some of the behaviour patterns were just fascinating to witness at such close quarters… we often had an adult bear within five feet of us and after the first day of sheer terror I became as relaxed with them as they were with us. It was magical.

It was a wonderful trip, one day Eric, our excellent young guide, Martin and I went up by canoe to the top of the river, where it flows out of a big lake, this was the main spawning area, and although the fish weren’t in the lake yet, they were pouring into the top pool just below it. We had tremendous sport catching Coho salmon after salmon, at the foot of the snowcapped mountains with three bald eagles soaring in the 48 Country Images Special Edition

blue skies overhead... at one point a peregrine falcon flew so low over the river I could almost touch it with my rod. We paused several times to let big bears quietly make their right of way along the river in front of us.

One huge bear came up to within a very few feet of where I was standing sniffed at me and moved slowly away. It was very close. To show you how close I even got some decent big close ups on my phone! Now that’s got to be close… Chris Tarrant.

Anyone with an interest in photography or just nature viewing will be amazed at just how varied and close to nature you can be. Experienced guides are always at your side and they have a deep interest and understanding of their surroundings. These hugely powerful bears at Silver Salmon Creek have a huge natural food supply and being omnivores feed on the lush sedge and grasses in spring and early summer before moving on to many types of berries. The vast shoals of food rich Pacific Salmon arrive midsummer and enable these well fed bears to fatten up for winter.

At low tide some bears smell out and dig up razor clams which are a great delicacy to these bears. Humans in this part of Alaska therefore do not feature on their menu.

We are nothing more than a seagull or a rock to them.

They are extremely intelligent and naturally inquisitive.

It is therefore essential these bears do not associate us with food. We give them space and it is the bear that decides how close it is comfortable to us. There are occasions when they are almost too comfortable and may take an interest in one’s camera bag etc. The guide will ask us to back up a few feet and may talk to the bear in a calm but firm voice. That is all it takes to ensure mutual respect.

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We caught an enormous number of salmon, all bright silver, fresh from the sea It should be stressed that this is a unique location and experience.

Inland bears are something totally different!! With much less food and a taste for carrion (dead deer, caribou etc.) these inland brown bears often referred to as grizzly bears, should be viewed from a safe distance or around 300 yards, and one should always have a place of safety to reach quickly, vehicle, building etc. With the inland grizzly most things are on their menu!

journey to the far northwest so worthwhile. We have visited remote camps on Kodiak Island, hired a car and visited the scenic Kenai Peninsular, numerous glaciers, the coastal towns of Seward and Homer in addition to the historic former frontier town of Talkeetna, gateway to Mount Denali and with a few hours drive of spectacular Denali National Park (busy in July/August but much quieter in May, June and September).

In addition to the Coastal Brown Bear it is possible to view moose, bald eagle, sea otters, tufted puffins and very occasionally‌ wolves.

The Alaskan Railway, featured on one of Chris’s railway programmes, offers an amazing experience and Gold Class is certainly worth the upgrade. Anchorage to Seward and Anchorage to Talkeetna, Denali and Fairbanks are all worthy routes to travel.

Whilst shorter trips are possible most guests stay for 4 to 7 nights at the lodge where the emphasis is on wildlife viewing and photography. The Alaskan Coastal Brown Bear is obviously the prime attraction and small groups are always escorted by knowledgeable and highly experienced guides.

All meals are included and the cabins grouped around the central lodge are extremely well furnished and have showers and flush toilets. Luxury in the real wilderness. All meals are included and we have always found the food to be top class.

As Anchorage is our gateway there are numerous options to create a varied and interesting itinerary of 2 to 3 weeks holiday and make the 50 Country Images Special Edition

Anchorage itself has a great downtown area with shopping malls, museums, bars, restaurants and shops all within an easy walk of city hotels. Anchorage makes for a great hub to venture out and explore this beautiful part of Alaska.

Access: Virgin/Delta provide a great daily service from London to Anchorage via Seattle. Economy is excellent value and comfortable.

Upper Class (first on Delta) superb. Service as you would expect from a Sir Richard Branson company is excellent throughout. Highly recommended and my preferred airline to Alaska.

FL ON EX LY I-D £4 EP 9 OS IT

B AH OOK EA IN D GN TO O 20 W 21

We are fully ABTA bonded

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Some Islands

By Brian Spencer

For a long time the idea of a visit to the Channel Islands has attracted me. The only previous links were when a refugee Guernsey boy was temporarily evacuated to us during the war, but I must confess that my knowledge of that time is a little hazy. So when we saw the advert in Slacks’ brochure it was too much to ignore.

The journey could not have been more civilised – bus into Derby, then the regular airport bus to east Midlands and a late morning flight to Guernsey where our accommodation within minutes of the harbour was next door to the house where Victor Hugo wrote les Miserables.

Guernsey is the second largest island in the archipelago, the last part of medieval England’s French territories. Completely self-governing, like the other islands it has its own currency and tax laws, making it a convenient off shore banking haven. The island sits more or less in the centre of the group and regular ferries make visiting the smaller islands a simple procedure.

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As the weather seemed set fine we decided to give our sea-faring trips top priority. Our plan was to start at Alderney, the most northerly and furthest island, but here we hit a snag. Even though the ferry service had a full page advert in the local guide, when we tried to book we were told the service was not operating – ‘for political reasons’, the lady at the booking office enigmatically told us. This was no real problem and a quick change of plans saw us on the Herm ferry that was just about to leave.

Herm was our first taste of remote island life. Tiny, you could walk round its four mile perimeter in a couple of hours, but that would be a pity.

Completely natural and with wide, pure white sandy beaches where, if they were being enjoyed by more than three or four others, a selfish person might complain about it being crowded! The island is currently owned by a couple called Singer who welcome all visitors and simply ask them to help preserve the island’s tranquillity and its amazing range of wild flowers and sea birds. St Tugual appears to have been the first person to use Herm

in Th e Channel The only transport to Sark

Part of the 8 Bays Walk as a sanctuary and the tiny church is dedicated to his memory. We walked clockwise round the windswept granite cliffs to the southern end where weirdly shaped granite rocks set in the sand marked the turning point. A couple of beach cafes made sure we didn’t starve until we strolled back to the busy little harbour.

Walking on Guernsey is a pleasure made easy by a frequent bus service, where the cost is one pound for whatever length of journey; we were surprised one day to find the bus so crowded, but realised that the passengers were all holidaymakers taking advantage of the cheap fare in order to travel right round the island.

St Peter Port

Our first walk started at Grand Havre in the north of the island and we beach-walked across 8 beautiful bays. Miles of spotlessly clean sand with no trace of rubbish of any kind led from headland to headland. Almost every bay had its beach café. None of them could be remotely called ‘greasy spoon’ and in the one where we stopped for lunch, we were able to buy freshly made crab sandwiches.

The islands suffered badly during the war. For some odd reason Hitler thought that because the islands were British territory, Winston Churchill would try to invade, an odd thing when one thinks of military strategy, as it was far more practicable to by-pass them and invade mainland Europe.

Using slave labour, the Nazis spent a huge amount of effort in defending the islands and their surreal concrete pill boxes and gun emplacements are still a reminder of those unhappy days. Even at the end of the war, Guernsey was not liberated until the day after VE day.

Guernsey’s one-time tomato industry is a mere fraction of what it was prewar. The decline began when in the 1960s when Dutch growers could enjoy the benefits of subsidised fuel, something the British government was loathe to copy. Its final death knell came when Doctor Beeching produced his infamous report on the future of our railways. Apparently the ferry service that carried the tomatoes was run by British Rail and as they were returning more or less empty, they were considered uneconomical and therefore axed.

Without transport, the island tomato growers stood no chance of survival.

All round Guernsey there are the sad reminders of this once thriving industry, with abandoned greenhouses slowly collapsing. However, not all growers have abandoned their trade. Some now grow cut early green vegetables and cut salads, or flowers, with freesia a profitable speciality.

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Th e French Victor Hugo’s house We were staying at St Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey. The busy marina just off the promenade is full of expensive looking sailing boats and fishing boats, but while we were there a ‘Round Britain’s Islands’ cruise came in and had to park itself further out in deep water with passengers ferried ashore to be taken on a conducted tour . Pleasant as it was to gaze at all that seafaring activity, we were really on our way to Castle Cornet, Guernsey’s pre-German first line of defence. Guarding the harbour mouth, it was built in the time of George III, but its main purpose was during the Napoleonic Wars; then it withstood bombardment from a French man of war. Like Edinburgh Castle they fire a noon-day gun that went off bang on time with a lot of noise and smoke. Inside the castle the maze of corridors and dead ends would have been enough to bewilder any attacker lucky to get through its massive walls, but we did eventually reach the highest point and its more modern ex-German gun post.

The other essential visit we made in and around St Peter Port was to Victor Hugo’s house, where he lived after failing to support Napoleon III. Owned not as one might expect, by the National Trust, it is run by a similar French organisation. Everything about the place is French, even to the tricolour

54 Country Images Special Edition

Rear of Victor Hugo’s house flying proudly over the entrance. Hugo seems to have been a bit of a DIY enthusiast, making things from cast off items such as a chandelier made from bobbins, or a double door made from old panelling cut in half and turned through ninety degrees, but the overall effect is very post Jacobean, part 18th century Franco/Chinese. It is easy to imagine him pacing up and down across his rooftop Captain’s walk, planning the next stage in his great masterpiece.

The Saumarez family were in the top echelon of Guernsey’s Georgian society. Their house in the north-west corner of the island is now a retirement home, but the old stable block has been converted into a museum of island costume and old fishing, farming and industrial equipment of a by-gone less mechanised era.

Our final walk on the main island was around the mist-shrouded pinecovered south-eastern corner. The island authorities look after footpaths extremely well and it was just a pleasant up and down stroll, guided by the boom of the foghorn on St Martin’s Point. It was here that the Germans built yet another of their gun posts. The concrete though succumbing to the test of time is still there, though its effect was weakened by the sight of a

Connection Sark

Hern little boy using it to jump into his mother’s arms. Carrying on for three or four more miles we gave the German Occupation Museum a only a passing glance before catching one of the one pound buses back to base.

I have often been intrigued by a photograph taken on the Island of Sark. It is of a narrow ridge perched high above the sea which is on both sides and connects the two parts of Sark that may one day crumble into two islands.

Sark is almost medieval in the way it is run, but no one there seems to mind in the least. It is completely free of cars with the only form of transport either horse drawn or tractor; even the local fire engine with its London omnibus wheels is pulled by a tractor. The crew were practicing cliff rescues as thankfully in lieu of fires their main work is rescuing sheep or tourists who stray on to the surrounding cliffs.

Cornet Castle

We sailed to Sark past Brecqhou, the bleak tax haven island-home of the reclusive Barclay brothers, owners of The Daily telegraph; unlike all the other tiny islands, visitors are not welcome on Brecqhou. With the single thought in my mind we headed for the ‘ridge’, first passing a flourishing vineyard the first stage in Sark’s almost unknown vintage. The ridge when we reached it surprised all expectations; a narrow road, nothing more than a surfaced track fills the ridge top. Not a place for anyone with vertigo, they should avoid the awesome drops on each side tumbling down to a hungry sea. A plaque half way across says that it was built in 1945 by a unit of the Royal Engineers together with German Prisoners of War. Tiny as it is, Sark has its fair share of interesting people. We passed a strange looking timber house where the notice on its gate told us that the witch was at home! In what passes as the town centre, all six or seven buildings of it, we spotted a golden GPO pillar box; it commemorates the 2012 Olympics gold medal Sark islander Carl Hester won for the GB Equestrian team in the dressage event – not bad for an island with a population of around 600 and one witch!

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Birdwatching during lockdown

O

K, so you’ve cut the lawn and trimmed the edges, and tidied up the hedge. You’ve done some weeding and a bit of pruning.

You’ve even painted the fence. If it wasn’t for Covid-19, your garden would now be good enough to open to the public!

What can you do next? The answer is to spend some time sitting in the garden, especially with your children, and just looking. It’s a great way to relax.

Birds are most active and noisiest from April to June, and with less traffic, you are hearing more of them. They

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are singing to attract a partner or to announce that they have a nest ready for occupation.

The best way to learn more about them is to watch with someone else. It’s a great opportunity to introduce wildlife into your children’s home learning curriculum.

fortune of a garden, there are plenty of parks and open spaces around Derby where you can have your permitted daily exercise and spot some birds at the same time. Many of them have lakes or ponds which will give you the bonus of seeing water birds.

If you don’t have the good

I live in the middle of a

residential area, so it is a case of watch, hope and entice!

As you’ll see from this picture of my back garden, it has the thing that all birds want – a birdbath.

For birds, clean water is essential both for drinking, and for bathing to keep their plumage free of mites etc. If you don’t have a bird bath, any dish or bowl can be used.

Keep the water clean, clean out any bird mess regularly, and keep it filled up. I top up mine every morning first thing, and again during the day if there has been a lot of bathing or the sun has made the level reduce. If it is too deep, put a stone or brick in the middle so that birds can perch on it.

Our most frequent bather is the Blackbird, who can get a very good splash up the fence, and really seems to enjoy the cold clean water. Robins are also regular, and Dunnocks and Woodpigeons, although the Pigeons use it mainly for drinking.

I can’t begin to guess how many hours we have spent watching the birds bathing.

After they have finished

they invariably go to a high fence point to complete their ablutions. Cleaning the beak is usually first, then wing fluttering and then they spend a lot of time preening, to clean their feathers and get them in the right alignment for flight.

On the left of the picture is a small solar fountain. Being solar the water only flows when the sun is out, but the two bowls retain enough water for birds to drink.

This photograph shows three things I have put there for the birds.

You can see two of the four nest boxes in my garden.

They all have an entry hole of 3.2cms diameter, the size for a blue tit box. If the hole is bigger, it is liable to attract larger creatures like squirrels or magpies. If you have a supply of spare wood you could make your own nest box - check the internet for measurements.

My bird feeder is made of strong plastic tubing and metal. If the feeder is too flimsy it could be damaged by squirrels. I fill it with mixed seed to attract different birds.

I regularly see the Dunnock throwing out the bits they don’t like, so that they can get to their favourite food, and the Woodpigeon comes along and vacuums up anything dropped! Try not to buy cheap, poor quality food – my mixed seeds have peanut pieces, black sunflower, corn etc.

Remember contaminated food can kill birds, and large nuts can choke young birds.

Fat balls (never salted) are a good source of food and energy.

So let me share some of the enjoyment of the regular birds that come to my garden.

These are some of the birds you have a good chance of seeing either in your garden, or when you are on your permitted daily walk. I started my current garden bird list three weeks ago when I could no longer go birdwatching at Carsington.

It was a joy to become completely absorbed for three one hour sessions watching the comings and goings in my garden.

To make a bird survey, all you need is a sheet of paper with board to rest it on, a pencil, binoculars if someone in the

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family has a pair, and a simple bird guide like an Eye-Spy book or a Bill Oddie bird guide.

You will also need a watch to make a note of the time of sighting. Or you can create a spreadsheet on your computer.

The most active on survey 1 was a pair of Blue Tits which went in and out of No 4 nest box 7 times, 3 times carrying nesting material. This had to be a spot to keep an eye on, but sadly for some reason I only saw them once in week 2 and once in week 3, and in both cases all they did was take food from the feeder, and did not go in the box. That suggests something changed and maybe they had another nest they preferred. I can’t think of anything that happened in my garden to discourage them.

That was a sad outcome from my regular monitoring.

Blue tits are yellow and blue, a bit washed out in colour.

Don’t confuse with the Great Tit, which is bigger and with a black head and sharper

58 Country Images Special Edition

colours.

The next busy bird was a Woodpigeon. I soon spotted his regular flight path – right to left over the lawn, over the flower beds and down to the base of the seed feeder. His food comes solely from the food that other birds have thrown out of the feeder, and his best friend there is the Dunnock.

For the 3rd survey I put some seed in a dish on the lawn.

The Woodpigeon flew over it 16 times! Then while he was waiting on our house roof, he watched a Blackbird eating from the dish. When the Blackbird left, he flew down, walked round the dish three times, then tucked in! He was eating for 11 minutes, following which he walked across the lawn to the bird bath, drank, and left.

Most people know the Woodpigeon, a heavy bird, with a very distinctive white patch on its neck. Not to be confused with the feral Pigeons that live on cliffs and in cities, such as Osnabrook Square in Derby.

On survey 2, I clocked that he would come in to feed and if there was no food, he’d be gone in 15 to 30 seconds. But on one trip when the Dunnock had previously been down before him, he was feeding for four minutes.

Now comes the Blackbird. Very much the early bird, and the bird most likely to be digging for worms in your lawn, or throwing out the moss in your gutters. He will protest quite loudly if you get too close to his patch, as he flies away.

In survey 1, Blackbirds were logged seven times, and in the 3rd survey 12 times, yet

hardly at all in survey 2. I’m not quite sure what is going on, but I think the activity in week 3 indicates that there is some nest building going on in a nearby dense hedge.

As its name implies, the Blackbird is all black with a yellow beak, smaller than a Pigeon but bigger than a Blue Tit. The female is brown.

Blackbirds sing a great deal, usually on the top of a tree or branch, and can run quite quickly if disturbed.

Dunnocks are very frequent in our garden and are what birders call LBJ’s (Little Brown Jobs). They are usually found near the ground among the bushes. We often have them in pairs, and they are presently spending a lot of time chasing each other, with a lot of wing flapping. Quite clearly this is the mating season. When they do pause, they can sit on a hedge or fence and sing a sad but pleasant repetitive song.

In my garden much of their time is spent in and around the feeder, and as I said earlier they choose what they want and throw the unwanted seed

out and on to the ground.

Dunnocks are around all year and are sparrow size. In fact they look like Sparrows with their varied brown feathers, but they are actually in a group called Accentors. Watch out for these very active birds.

The Robin is not a bird that I see very frequently in my garden, but as long as you get Christmas cards, you will know the National Bird of England.

The redbreast makes it very distinctive. When it does visit my house, it is usually to bathe, something I have seen a number of times in the last three weeks. It searches for small living food rather than seed, although it will visit my feeder.

The Robin is almost the first bird to sing in the morning, usually on a visible branch although sometimes you can hear it but not see it. Juveniles have the pink breast when they are still young but it slowly deepens to become the red that we all know. In bad and cold weather Robins will follow you from bush to bush in the hope

of food, and with patience will take seed from your hand.

Mealworms will get their attention even quicker! If you want to show off, say you have seen an Erithacus Rubecula!

That’s the top five in my garden, but your garden could quite possibly get other and different birds, such as the Collared Dove, Great Tit, Magpie, Starling, House Sparrow, Pied Wagtail, Chaffinch, Goldfinch, the rarer Greenfinch, Long Tailed Tit, Carrion Crow, Rook, Raven and Jackdaw.

And on top of this list, if you can get to a lake, then you can add Mallard, Coot, Moorhen, Mute Swan, Canada Goose, Great Crested Grebe, and Tufted Duck. So much to see!

We would love to hear about your sightings from your birdwatching. Why not share your photos with on our Derby Parks social media pages? Tag them #Birdwatching.

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Nursery Rhymes and

By Brian Spencer We learn nursery rhymes at our mother’s knee and repeat them in childhood games, but how many of us have looked into the historical meaning of their seemingly innocuous lines?

attempts to conquer Wales. Roads at that time were badly maintained and his horse fell into a deep drain which the king thought was a mere puddle.

Despite Edward’s size (he was also known as Longshanks), he became stuck and had to be helped out by his retainers. It is not surprising that he never returned to such an inhospitable place ever again.

Most were first penned centuries ago as satirical reminders of unpopular political events, or to commemorate the execution of a queen. Others bring our attention to the turbulent times following Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome and the spate of religious intolerance which followed.

Some even have a hidden cruel meaning. There is even one that could be linked to a tragic event closer to home when the brave village of Eyam put itself into voluntary quarantine during an outbreak of bubonic plague.

The following is just a selection of the true meanings of innocent sounding nursery rhymes beginning with what is probably the most well known, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep:

Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool?

During the Middle Ages, England’s economy was based on its wool trade, an economy that was thriving when Norman King William’s scribes produced the Domesday Book, a survey of the wealth of his new kingdom. Later monarchs taxed this trade in order to fund their expansionary military campaigns, taking a third of the value of each woolsack, hence the line Three bags full, one of which went to the master (the king), another third to the dame as a tithe to the church, with the final portion left to the actual producer, little boy who naturally enough (cries down the lane).

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Humpty Dumpty was the name given to a massive cannon used by the Royalist forces during the English Civil War (1642-1651). For reasons known only to him, the master gunner known as One-Eyed Jack, had the cannon dragged to the top of a church tower in Colchester. Here it played havoc amongst the attacking Parliamentary forces until they managed to destroy the tower, sending Humpty Dumpty crashing to the ground where it buried itself in the muddy ground. Despite the attempts of King Charles’ cavalry (the horses), and his soldiers (men), it was impossible to bring the gun back into action and so Colchester was soon overrun by Parliamentarian Col Fairfax and his Roundheads. The rhyme was written soon afterwards as a form of propaganda commemorating the military victory and it quickly became a children’s favourite.

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester In a shower of rain.

He stepped in a puddle Right up to his middle And never went there again.

Doctor Foster was the nickname of Edward I (1239-1307) who was keen to reap the rewards of the Gloucestershire wool trade in order to finance his 60 Country Images Special Edition

This next rhyme delves into the macabre and has political links with the French Revolution:

Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water;

At first glance the rhyme doesn’t make sense, for why should anyone go uphill to fetch a pail of water? Surely water flows downhill and the best place to find it would be at the bottom? There are at least four possible historical

Their Hidden Meanings meanings to this rhyme. The first refers to the execution of French Louis XVI and profligate Marie Antoinette. The hill they climb is the scaffold topped by the guillotine where King Louis (aka Jack) lost both his head and crown, followed soon by Marie Antoinette’s tumbling after. Another unpopular king, Charles I attempted to increase tax revenues by reducing the authorised size of beer and wine measures. Until then, both could be bought as a pint or half pint, the latter known as a ‘Jack’. By reducing the measure to a quarter pint known as a ‘Gill’ (pronounced Jill), which in other words came tumbling down, he was able to effectively double the amount of Excise Duty flowing into the royal coffers. The crown on the half-pint line of a beer glass (still referred to as a gill in some places), marks the time when Jack was decreased in volume by King Charles I. A sad but more rural version of the rhymes dates from 1697 Kilmersdon in Somerset where a young couple called Jack and Jill did their courting on top of a nearby hill, hidden from prying eyes. Inevitably Jill became pregnant, but just before the baby was born Jack was killed by a falling rock and Jill died in childbirth soon after. To commemorate this event the village has placed a number of stone tablets along the path they trod to the top of the hill. With all these versions, there is an even older one dating from 1595 when a line in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ says that ‘Jack shall have Jill/ Nought shall go ill.’ But this is possibly only a way of referring to an unnamed couple and could well be even older than the bard.

Following the death of her brother, Edward, Henry VIII’s only male heir, she became queen and immediately set about murderously converting the country back to Roman Catholicism. Never popular, she was ‘contrary’ to the current Protestant religion and only had the backing from her protégé Steven Gardiner (`garden’), whom she appointed Bishop of Winchester.

The silver bells and cockle shells are euphemisms for instruments of torture and execution of those dissenters who refused to return to the old faith.

For the next three nursery rhymes we have to go back to the sixteenth century and the turbulence caused by Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the King of Spain..

I had a little nut tree, Nothing would it bear But a silver nutmeg And a golden pear.

This refers to the political intrigue when Henry VIII married his elder brother’s widow in order to cement links between England and Spain.

Arthur had died before becoming king, allowing Henry to take the throne.

Purely for political expedience, his father Henry VII arranged the marriage.

This hardly made conditions ripe for a love match, especially as she never managed to produce a son and was cast aside in favour of Anne Boleyn. The nut tree is England and the fruits its wealth being offered as a dowry. What follows next comes as the result of the breakdown of Henry and Catherine’s marriage.

Mother Hubbard Went to the cupboard To fetch her poor dog a bone.

In this rhyme Cardinal Wolsey is Mother Hubbard and King Henry her dog.

The cupboard is Rome which of course refused to allow the king to divorce Catherine and so is bare.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow?

Innocent sounding it might be this rhyme in fact refers to Mary I of England (1516-58), Catherine of Aragon’s daughter and Henry VIII’s eldest child.

Coming closer to home there is a rhyme that can be used as a children’s dancing game, but it has deeper and sadder meaning:

Ring-a-ring o’roses, A pocket full of posies; A’shoo! A’tishoo!

We all fall down.

Frequently throughout the Middle Ages and well into the seventeenth century, England was beset by regular outbursts of bubonic plague, a disease carried by rat-borne fleas. The Black Death of the late 1340s and the Plague of London in 1665 were the two major outbreaks of this dread disease.

Almost the whole country was affected by it at some time or other, none more than Eyam when the plague entered the village in a bale of cloth. The courageous stand of Eyam led by its minister the Rev William Mompesson is well documented and graphically told in the local museum. The rhyme Ring-a-Ring of Roses is usually sung by a circle of children with the words meaning as follows: Ring o’Roses — The rash around the victim’s neck formed in the early stages of the disease.

Pocket full of posies — The scent of flowers was believed to act as a cure.

A’tishoo — Sneezing was one of symptoms of bubonic plague.

All fall down — Death.

Anyone wishing to delve deeper into the history of children’s nursery rhymes will find a wealth of information in Albert Jack’s ‘Pop Goes the Weasel — The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes’. Published by Penguin Books and illustrated by Lara Carlini.

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Riber Castle’s Rebirth

A Grade II listed building of historical, architectural and industrial interest…

For years Riber Castle, Smedley’s Folly has suffered from neglect and unless something was done to save it from oblivion, Matlock’s benevolent guardian could well have disappeared for ever. That ‘something’, as Brian Spencer discovered is the work currently being carried out by Cross Tower Ventures who, without altering the appearance of Grade II Listed Riber Castle are converting it into upwards of 46 apartments and houses; dwellings that will overlook some of the finest views in the Peak District.

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Above and below: The Grand Salon in its hayday.

…overlooking some of the finest views in the Peak District.

Decorative plasterwork in the Atrium

S

tanding at around 853 feet above sea level, high above the Derwent Valley, with its dramatic silhouette of 90 foot high towers and 1450 foot of battlements, this was mill owner and philanthropist John Smedley’s proudest achievement. An advocate of hydropathy, his ‘water cure’ brought the great and the good to Smedley’s Hydro, the building that is now the headquarters of Derbyshire County Council. Riber was planned

by Smedley to be both his home and an upmarket extension to his original hydropathic empire.

A man who seemed to be able to turn his hand to almost anything, John Smedley did not employ an architect, but simply instructed builders to carry out his grand design. This cannot have gone too badly, for despite the years of neglect, the outer stone walls, built from dressed stone quarried a few yards from the castle are, with relatively minor exceptions, still as true as they were in 1860.

When Smedley died in 1874, the already declining use of the castle as a hydro was eventually abandoned, but his widow, Caroline, continued to live there until her death in 1892. As the couple had no children, the property was left to a distant Australian cousin, John Thomas Marsden, who having not shared his relative’s interest in hydropathy, sold the castle in 1892.

Historic Rescue Operation For about twenty-odd years, Riber was used as a private boys’ school, but very much in keeping with the fortunes of Riber Castle, this was closed in 1929. Attempts to sell the building drew no serious offers, and so in 1936, Matlock Urban District Council bought the place in order to save the town’s iconic view point. During the Second World War it was requisitioned by the Ministry of Food as a store for bulk foodstuffs such as sugar. Unfortunately it was from sugar finding its way into the floorboards that caused the internal timbers to rot. This disintegration of the building’s fabric was also not helped, when, for some unknown reason, the castle roof Country Images Special Edition 63

was removed. The last time Riber’s shell served as any useful purpose was between the early 1960s and 2000 when the ruin was used as a European fauna reserve. For a time the zoo ran a successful programme of breeding such animals as the European lynx, some of which were exported with the help of RAF Lynx helicopters, to reintroduce them into a Spanish National Park. Regrettably the cost of running the zoo became excessive and it closed at the beginning of the decade.

With the building very much at risk, something had to be done to prevent it becoming a huge pile of stones on Matlock’s skyline. This was when a local businessman, the descendant of a family with a keen interest in historic buildings and interior design stepped in to realise a long-held dream to own Riber Castle. In so doing, he set in motion a dramatic and historic rescue operation to bring the castle back to life. His plan was that whilst keeping the appearance of Riber as near as possible to John Smedley’s original design, the Castle would be converted into luxury apartments served by helicopter from Manchester Airport. Underground car parking, an ultra-modern swimming pool on the site of Smedley’s bath house, together with raised flower beds, croquet lawns and an orangery built on the site of their original forebears.

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New foundations, rebuilt walls, additional outbuildings and modern roofing materials will secure the future of Riber Castle.

Backed by English Heritage As with many innovative developments, there was the now almost inevitable campaign, arguing that increased traffic use could spoil the atmosphere surrounding the tiny hamlet, where the buildings mostly date from the seventeenth-century. Valid though this argument may be, the development was backed by English Heritage who believed that the sensitive restoration plan was the only hope if Riber Castle was to be saved. After many years of controversy, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister approved the scheme in 2006.

We were taken round the site by Ivan White, Project Director and Julian Thackray, Site Manager, both men with years of on-site experience. Despite the over £8millions already spent, this is still very much ‘work in progress’.

Nevertheless from my untrained eye it was easy to see how the overall scheme is progressing.

We began our tour viewing what will be the third floor apartments based on John Smedley’s massive Grand Salon. Using his original ‘footprint’, the apartments will mostly follow the plan of his rooms leading off the two galleries. To let in light a modern atrium hidden from outside view has replaced the removed roof. Each apartment has its own private outside seating area sheltered by the battlements and where it is easy to imagine the owners enjoying a sun-down drink whilst watching the sun go down over Masson Hill. Heating is underfloor from boilers installed where Smedley’s coal-fired systems once operated; and the state of the art, fire extinguisher systems were, to us, like some science fiction apparatus. Modern double glazing now fills the original window frames. Some of the larger windows cleverly disguise the fact that they cover two floors, but it is the circular windows that magically frame the best views. Completing the theme of Victorian opulence, huge chandeliers will hang from the ceiling, but tastefully gilded plasterwork decoration is already in place around the upper level. This all gives the modern impression of the Victorian era Grand Salon as it once was.

While still fulfilling the idea of something that Smedley would approve,

a modern lift will whisk owners up to their high-level castle-based homes.

On the ground floor a luxurious endless swimming pool, jacuzzi spa, sauna and fitness equipment, will be part of the leisure center being built where Smedley’s original bath house once stood. Hopefully no longer will visitors be sluiced by high pressure cold water, but instead pampered in the style expected by anyone paying over £700,000 for the privilege of living at Riber.

In keeping with the original, the castle has no front entrance (Smedley and his guests would drive into the coach house and enter through a covered way directly into the mansion). His original orangery is being recreated as the main entrance on the west side. Residents arriving by car or helicopter will access it by way of an underground car park and move up into the orangery to pass through the grand arch entrance into the atrium.

Existing outhouses including the original coach house, stable block and gate houses will form ten further dwellings of varying sizes using stone from nearby Birchover Quarry. All in all they will be part of an innovative plan that should save Riber Castle for generations to come.

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A ride along the

Midland Railway from Butterley

At one time it was possible for trains to travel directly from Nottingham to Manchester without going through Sheffield. Trains laden with Nottinghamshire coal would leave the Sheffield line above between Codnor Park Station and Pye Bridge Ironville and travel through Golden Valley to Ambergate where they would join the London via Derby line to Manchester. Brian Spencer recently took a ride along the remains of this line on a steam train run by the Midland Railway – Butterley Trust.

Nowadays the A38 prevents trains from running all the way to Ambergate, but when the line was open, Ambergate Station was unique, with three-platforms in the shape of a triangle. It was also the junction of three lines, Sheffield to London via Derby, London to Manchester again via Derby and the line from the junction with the Nottingham to Sheffield service. Incidentally this last named junction is still in operation, unlike the now truncated Ecclesbourne Valley Line at Duffield. By using the route through Butterley, trains could go directly towards Manchester without travelling by way of Sheffield. As well as hauling coal, it gave Nottingham people a direct way into the Peak District, especially to their inland favourite, Matlock Bath.

Now that the line has been taken over by the Midland Railway Trust, it allows railway buffs of all shades to enjoy a day of nostalgia, riding in circa 1950 carriages behind a powerful exMidland/British Rail Stanier locomotive. Run by volunteers using authentic rolling stock, it allows us mere mortals to appreciate the joys of steam travel – even down to getting a spot of coal grit in our eyes!

We reached Butterley with just enough time to enjoy a cup of tea before joining the 11:00a.m service. The round trip is quite leisurely, taking just over an hour to complete the up and down journey; but as most visitors do, we chose to break the trip half way at Swanwick Junction, joining a later train to complete the ride.

There is something about steam that appeals to everyone young or old. There was even the re-enactment of that famous Southern Region poster of a little boy asking the driver if he was also going on holiday. Few passengers were on board when the locomotive arrived all of a flurry with a good head of steam. Everyone crowded at the end of the platform to watch it roll up and be coupled, before they would drag themselves away to find one of the comfortable seats; just to show how things have changed, there are seats for four on one side of the gangway, sitting round a table and two on the opposite side, still with their table.

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All aboard the

Seaside Special

Above: The former British Railway Standard Class 5MT 4-6-0 locomotive no. 73129 restored and hauling the Seaside Special at the Midland Railway - Butterley Trust.

Far left: The crest of the former Midland Railway.

Left: The fully operational signal box

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Main picture: Swanwick Junction and from left to right: Butterley Station platform sign.

All aboard!

Vintage luggage.

The outward journey is up a surprisingly steep incline, through a wooded cutting below what remains of the historic Butterley Ironworks. Pausing briefly at the open space filled by Swanwick Junction and its marshalling yard, the train travels leisurely through attractive open countryside and on by way of Ironville, the village built to house miners and workers in the now long gone local iron foundries. Along the way and on a nearby hilltop a tall stone tower commemorates William Jessop (1745-1814) canal builder and founder of the local coal and iron making industry.

Above Ironville the line is linked to Network Rail’s main line, but trains do not go that far. Here the engine moved from front to back so to speak in order to haul the train on its homeward leg. Even though this is a heritage railway, with only one train at a time on the track, correct procedures must be applied at all times, be it signalling or driving.

We left the train at Swanwick Junction where the vast open space has been used to full advantage in a full-sized train layout. From the platform of a station moved lock stock and barrel from the Midland Mainline at Syston in Leicestershire and then rebuilt at Swanwick, the choice of where to go was bewildering. We chose to go to the right, heading for the main loco sheds in the Matthew Kirtley Building. We went by way of the fully operational signal box just like the one at Matlock Bath where I used to watch my Uncle Charlie work the complex system of levers and inter-station regulating bells.

This one was moved into its present location from Kettering.

The Matthew Kirtley Building is named after Midland Railway’s first Mechanical Engineer and houses an exhibition hall featuring the Trust’s 68 Country Images Special Edition

main collection of lovingly maintained rolling stock. While it is off limits to visitors, work going on in the workshops at the back of the hall can be watched through the large clear glass windows. Nearby are displays of vintage road transport vehicles and fork lift trucks. It is also possible to ride on the narrow gauge man-carriers that would have once taken miners underground to the coal face of some east midlands colliery.

Two short branch lines enter the complex, one ran up to Butterley Ironworks and the other on the opposite side of the permanent way can still be seen winding its way as it once did, to Swanwick Colliery.

Across the old way into the ironworks, a footpath wends its way through naturalising bushes and trees to the West Shed Experience. Here there is a display operated by the Princess Royal Class Locomotive Trust. Housing a display of lovingly tended rolling stock; when we were there it was 46203 Princess Margaret Rose that had pride of place. Originally it worked express passenger services for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), before being withdrawn from service in 1962. It then spent a few years in a Butlin’s holiday camp before being restored to full working order in 1990. It last ran in 1996 and is now awaiting another major overhaul, when the cost is likely to be around £750,000!

Butlin’s feature strongly in the side gallery of West Shed when you can step back in time admiring one of the 21inch miniature locomotives that ran round their holiday camps from 1938 until the 1960s. Another gallery is devoted to locomotive designer and Chief Mechanical Engineer to the LMS Sir William Stanier. It was he who designed the locomotives powerful

Below; Apologies to the famous Southern Railways poster.

enough to haul trains up the steep gradients around Monsal Dale and beyond.

Time was passing and we had only visited the main sheds – there was still a model railway layout and the corrugated St Saviour’s Church built in 1898 for the railway village of Westhouses near Alfreton, but with tongues almost on the floor we headed for Johnson’s Buffet and a cuppa plus a bowl of home-made soup.

Bang on the dot of 14:40 the train arrived on its homeward journey. Rather than stop at Butterley it runs as far as the A38 at Hammersmith where the engine in all its glory wheezed its way to the back of the train and, after coupling up once again, took us back to Butterley. Here there was enough time to enjoy playing trains with the huge model railway layout before rejoining the twenty first century traffic.

The Midland Railway – Butterley is a volunteer run trust whose members give up their spare time to relive the way trains ran not all that long ago.

There are special events run throughout the year, such as, Teddy Bears Weekends and when we were there, a Sea Side Special – the sea side turned out to be a sandy ‘beach ’at Swanwick Junction, explaining why there were so many buckets and spades on board our train. Grown up train buffs can enjoy things like the Diesel or Vintage Weekends, or maybe learn to drive one of the steam monsters designed by Sir William Stanier.

For further information phone: 01773 570721 or visit the website: www.midlandrailway-butterley.co.uk

For holidays I always go

Midland Cos it’s the ‘Sunshine Line’

Country Images Special Edition 69

St ainsby Mill Most visitors to Hardwick Hall barely give a passing glance when they drive past Stainsby Mill, but as Brian Spencer discovered, here is a unique example of a working flour mill operating on the same site for well over 700 years.

F

rom the roadside next to the local war memorial the stone walls of the mill surround the water-powered machinery still able to grind flour almost exactly as it did when the first mill was built on the site in the thirteenth century.

In 1216, the Savage family became the first Lords of the Manor of Stainsby.

One of their profitable duties was to provide a water mill in order to grind corn grown by their tenants. Following the passing of laws that effectively strengthened the power of the aristocracy, these tenants had no alternative other than to take their grain to their lordship’s mill and pay whatever dues were dictated from on high.

In 1593, Bess of Hardwick, always on the lookout for ever more lucrative ways of expanding her fortunes – she was already the second wealthiest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth -, bought Stainsby Mill from the Savages. It was during this time that she was building her masterpiece, 70 Country Images Special Edition

Hardwick Hall, and the mill became an important addition to the rapidly expanding Hardwick Estate. From that time and until modern methods of flour milling made it redundant, Stainsby Mill continued to be owned by Bess of Hardwick’s descendants, the Cavendishes, later to become the Dukes of Devonshire. The last commercial milling took place in 1952 and the mill closed. Following the death of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, the Stainsby Mill was handed to the National Trust by 1970 as part of death duties.

By the mid-1800s the mill was falling into dis-repair and was no longer working. Realising that his asset needed protecting, the 6th Duke of Devonshire ordered that it should be rebuilt and completely refurbished.

This work was carried out in 1850 at the total cost of £962 17s 5d; the accounts are still in the Chatsworth archives and give details of eighteen separate payments ranging from J. Booth Esq who was paid 3s 0d for supplying hair to strengthen plaster, to Messrs Kirkland & Sons who made the complex machinery to drive the grindstones; their bill came to £577 4s 9d.

700 years of milling

Corn on the way up to the grinding floor

The mill we see today is virtually unchanged from the work carried out on behalf of the 6th Duke of Devonshire whose work alongside his head gardener Sir Joseph Paxton laid the foundations of not only Chatsworth Garden, but most of the Cavendish Estates. The massive water wheel that powers the mill is almost hidden within the covered grinding machinery.

Water to power the wheel comes from nearby Stainsby Pond created to improve supply in 1762. The mill’s original supply came from Miller’s Pond, part of the system below Hardwick Hall and which in turn is fed by the River Doe Lee and linked to the later pond which was flooded to create a better supply.

The wheel driven by this environmentally friendly system has 49 buckets, each holding about ten gallons, or one hundred pounds of water. To reach the wheel the water is controlled by a sluice gate and on completing its circle round the wheel, water empties into the Mill Race, or leet and then continues to flow alongside an adjoining field to where it re-joins the River Doe Lee.

The sack hoist Country Images Special Edition 71

Inside the mill The power of 4900 pounds of water on each revolution of the wheel is carried by a wrought iron axle into the body of the mill. Here a complex system of cogs, pulleys, levers, chains and grindstones convert this power into the flour.

As often as not, grain coming to the mill was slightly damp and had to be dried in a brick coal-fired kiln to the left of the main part of the ground floor. Sacks of the ready grain were weighed in the adjacent lean to and then hauled up onto the grinding floor of the main building by the simple but clever system of a hoist driven by one of the off-shoots of the main drive from the water wheel. The sacks reach the upper floors by forcing open the two sections of upside down trap doors which automatically shut when the sack reaches its destination and so preventing anyone accidentally falling through the hole.

Flour dust is a highly combustible material and as metal gearing produces a lot of heat, wooden gearing which also does not have to be lubricated with dust-catching grease, another fire hazard, is used where practicable. This dust is created mostly in the actual grinding, or milling process.

However, before the grain reaches this part of its conversion to flour, it is cleaned and sifted in a belt-driven enclosed box contraption jigging to and fro. Next the clean grain travels upwards again by an extension of the sack lift on to the top floor. Here it is manually fed into hoppers feeding the two millstones. According to the accounts from 1850 the stones are made partly from Derbyshire millstone and the others of French burrstone, costing a total of £40, a significant part of the final bill of £962 17s 5d. Each stone incidentally weighs over one and a half tons and hoisting them into position in the restricted space would have been a difficult proposition.

The final process is to grade the flour for specific needs and this was done by being swept through a specially graded sieve by a system of horse hair brushes to one side of the milling floor. From here the finished flour drops into appropriate hoppers on the ground floor where it is bagged for sale.

t he ‘works’ Miller’s smock

Stainsby Mill is run as a working mill by volunteers for the National Trust and is open in full working order Wednesday to Sunday, plus Bank Holiday Mondays between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. February through to October.

Flour milled at Stainsby Mill has no artificial additives and bags of it are on sale at the reception desk.

The mill race at the rear of the mill

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The mill yard

Mill stones

The tun - the cover for the mill stones Country Images Special Edition 73

THE

FAULD CRATER

The Ordnance Survey map for Derby and Burton-on-Trent shows a strange feature in the countryside near the village of Hanbury in Staffordshire, a little to the west of Tutbury. It is oval in shape and obviously deep, but too small for a quarry. As it is certainly not natural it intrigued Brian Spencer, and so he went along to investigate.

At 11am on Monday 27 November 1944 a massive explosion rent the air as the RAF bomb storage depot at Fauld near Tutbury exploded with a power that was heard scores of miles away; the seismic disturbance was even recorded at the Moroccan national laboratory in Casablanca.

The explosion was caused by the spontaneous detonation of upwards of 4000 tons of high explosive bombs and 500 million rounds of rifle ammunition stored in an underground storage depot in a disused gypsum mine. How it happened will never be known, but it is suspected that it was triggered off by someone accidentally letting a primed bomb fall on its nose.

This triggered off the largest explosion ever to happen in Britain, killing around 70 people both above and below ground. The crater, when the series of linked explosions finally stopped, was about three quarters of a mile in circumference and a hundred feet deep.

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Gypsum, the mineral used for plaster of paris and plaster board was and is still mined from a layer of that mineral occurring beneath the north-facing escarpment beyond Burton; in fact it is gypsum that gives the water used in brewing Burton beer its special flavour. The site was run by RAF MU 21 in one of the abandoned mines with access from the hamlet of Fauld.

Bombs stored at Fauld were normally safe, that is until they were fitted with a primed detonator prior being carried over Germany on a bombing mission. For some reason a number of the bombs sent out on a particular mission were not dropped and were returned back to Fauld to be put into storage once more.

With the serious deficiencies of manpower during wartime, much of the labour working in the underground store was unskilled - people were only too glad to earn a decent wage at that time. Alongside local people as

well as the RAF technicians, inexperienced Italian POWs were drafted in from nearby prisoner of war camps. Whether it was one of these unskilled workers who accidentally caused such a catastrophic explosion will never be known. Maybe one of the live bombs being returned fell on the floor, or what is more likely, someone was clumsy while unscrewing a primed detonator; whatever the cause, the result was a huge loss of life. One subsidiary theory voiced during a later enquiry was that it was known for workers unscrewing the detonators to use brass tools rather than wooden mallets as they were strictly instructed. Metal on metal could easily have caused a spark.

Eyewitnesses on the fateful day reported seeing two distinct columns of black smoke in the form of a mushroom cloud rising several thousand feet into the sky; they also saw flames pouring out of the ground at the base of the column. According to the commanding officer of RAF MU 21 Group Captain Stores, there was also an open dump of incendiary bombs nearby that caught fire, but it was allowed to burn itself out and caused no further damage or casualties.

All the loss of life and damage was the result of the underground explosion.

52 civilian workers, RAF technicians and Italian POWs were killed outright

The memorial to those who died listing military, civilian and Italian prisoners of war on one plaque. The stone was donated by the Italian Air Force.

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and another 18 on the surface. Almost all the houses in nearby Hanbury were severely damaged and the village pub, the Cock Inn had to be rebuilt. Upper Hayes Farm that stood more or less directly above the explosion simply disappeared, killing seven people and all the farm animals along with farm equipment – the farm was literally wiped off the map. A nearby reservoir containing 450,000 cubic metres of water was breached and the subsequent flooding caused further damage to nearby farms and lime works.

As bad as it was, the explosion could have been far worse, if it wasn’t for the fact that the storage areas were separated by impenetrable rock barriers left when the gypsum mine was being made. At the time there would have been upwards of 129,00 tons of bombs in store, but only a third of them exploded, enough to cause the biggest explosion ever to occur in Britain.

Since 1944, the land taken up by the crater has been made as secure as possible, but in view of the fact that the number of bombs that exploded will never be known, it is likely there are still numerous unexploded bombs lying all too close to the surface. Nature is doing its best to restore the ground in and around the crater, with dense undergrowth of bracken and brambles beneath now maturing trees.

The human side of the tragedy is now marked by a marble column of Novenna stone donated by the Italian Air Force twin of 16 RAF MU Stafford. On it are carved the names of all the military, both Italian as well as British, together with the civilian personnel killed underground, British as well as Italian, some of whom has no known grave.

During a chat with a couple of locals in the bar of the Cock Inn, one of them quietly told us that his grandfather and an uncle were two of the civilians killed in the disaster. They died, but two other uncles who fought on several fronts during the war, came home without a scratch

A SHORT WALK TO THE FAULD CRATER At the side of the public parking space next to the Cock Inn at Hanbury, a large scale map shows all the local footpaths within the parish. One of them, known as the Red Route, is a short walk of a mile or so and skirts the Ministry of Defence safety fence surrounding the crater.

closing with the junction of a woodland edge with a tall hedge.

From the car park take the footpath on the left signposted ‘To the Crater’. Follow it until a hedge appears and then go through a narrow gate on the left, swapping sides beside the hedge.

Follow the fence by going to the right, passing the memorial stone until another gate is reached. Go through this and begin to bear right. Enter a field and follow its boundary round to the right until you reach a wide gate beside a pile of slurry.

At the far end of the hedge go through another narrow gate, but ignoring the large yellow arrow pointing left, walk forwards gradually

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Go through yet another gate and bearing half right reach the high fence surrounding the crater – Ministry of Defence warning notices will tell you when you have reached the site.

Follow the farm track away and to the left as far as the road and turn right to return to the Cock Inn and Hanbury.

The weir on the River Derwent at Belper powering the Strutts’ mills.

Were the Strutts Nimbies?

The North Midland Railway’s proposal to build their line through Belper was bitterly opposed by the Strutts. Their reason was thought to be because they thought the line would disrupt the flow of river water powering their mills. Brian Spencer looks into the history of this dispute and its implications on the proposed, but now put on ‘pause’ electrification of Railtrack’s Midland Mainline.

In 1835 the East Midlands’ industrial prosperity was rapidly expanding. Begun by Richard Arkwright and continued by the likes of Jedediah Strutt, cotton spinning and weaving were also enjoying their share of this prosperity.

A group of Midlands industrialists formed the North Midlands Railway Company in order to connect South Yorkshire and Derbyshire with the rest of the country. To build their railway they commissioned George Stephenson the famous railway engineer, asking him to survey a possible route between Derby and Leeds. By this time Stephenson’s son George was well established alongside his father and George, together with Frederick Swanwick, was sub-contracted to

build the line. Working to a very tight schedule – the work was due to be completed within five years, they planned a route along the Derwent Valley as far as Ambergate, then northwards by way of Clay Cross to Chesterfield and beyond.

Considering the hilly terrain through which the line was to go and bearing in mind the limited power of locomotives at the time, no gradient was planned to be greater than 1 in 250. A major project for its time, the contractors had to move 131,000 cubic yards of earth for each of the 72 miles of track; (as a comparison, the Midland Counties Railway from Leicester to Derby and Nottingham, only required 95,000 cubic yards for each mile).

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On this page: Bridges over the section of track that passes through Belper were forced to be lower than usual. This is acceptable for modern diesels but is now a problem faced by Railtrack engineers planning to electrify the Midland Mainline.

By this time (1835), Jedediah Strutt’s three sons William, George and Joseph were in command of the thriving business. When they heard of the proposal to bring the line not only through Belper, but significantly close to their other mills at Milford and Derby, they immediately lodged an objection. There is no record of why they came up with this example of what we would call ‘nimbyism’ today. It is likely however, that they would have concerns over a potential loss of water from a diverted River Derwent that powered their factories.

To counter Stephenson’s plan, the Strutts suggested that the line be taken north east from Little Eaton, running by way of Holbrook, in order to join the Amber Valley somewhere to the west of Ripley. Not only did this proposal run through hilly terrain and therefore would need a

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Toadmoor Tunnel at Ambergate.

The flattened elliptical profile is yet another problem for those planning the electrification of the line.

considerable degree of tunnelling, but by missing Duffield, Belper and Ambergate, it would have precluded these places from having the valuable facility of a station.

intransigence, the line had to be run through a shallow cutting, no doubt to hide it as it passed through the town and especially Strutt’s housing around North Street.

A secondary suggestion, saw the line running a little to the east of Milford and then curving along the riverside, to miss the central part of Belper. For a while this suggestion was accepted by both the Strutts and the North Midland Railway Company and in fact it was agreed by an Act of Parliament in July 1836. Unfortunately what the railway engineers hadn’t spotted was that the ‘Milford Deviation Line’ as it was called, would need a fairly long tunnel through solid rock and so was abandoned.

One of the problems facing the engineers as they built the line through the Belper cutting, was its proximity to the surrounding streets. In order to keep the track as high as possible, bridges over the section through the town were forced to be lower than usual. This has become a problem faced by modern Railtrack engineers planning to electrify the Midland Mainline.

After a further year’s deliberation, a compromise was reached and a route was agreed, passing through Duffield, then by way of a short tunnel to the west of and by-passing Milford to cut through the centre of Belper. This, the final compromise, is still the route followed by Midland Mainline trains today.

In a perfect world and because the line had to start its climb north as quickly as possible, ideally it should have been laid near to the existing ground level. Possibly due to the Strutts further

While Stephenson’s steam driven locomotives and for that matter today’s diesel trains, have sufficient overhead clearance, as they pass through tunnels on their way north and south, there will be a shortage of space to run the overhead power lines. Tracks passing beneath bridges along the line, especially those near Belper town centre will have to be lowered several feet and station platforms re-designed. Furthermore, for safety reasons, the power cables will need to be well away from possible interference by pedestrians crossing the bridges or walking along the town centre footpaths around Belper.

electrification engineers is not one that can be aimed at the Strutts. About three miles north of Belper and where the mainline makes a wide sweep to start its climb up the Amber Valley towards Chesterfield, the track burrows its way beneath the wooded Ambergate hillside at Toadmoor Tunnel. Here the tunnel has the most flattened elliptical profile of any along the stretch around Belper. The reason for this is due to the instability of the surrounding ground which the Stephensons unexpectedly found to be mainly loose shale, rather than the coal-bearing seams they expected. This triggered off a couple of serious landslides, the remains of which can still be seen in Thatcher’s Wood above the tunnel’s portal. By the time of the second landslide the tunnel had been cut and it became necessary to insert twelve iron rings to secure the tunnel stonework at its southern end. This will be just another problem to task the planners as and when electrification takes place.

Electrification could be a great improvement to the Midlands’ rail service, but one wonders what the Strutts would have to say about this major replanning of the railway they so bitterly opposed.

A further problem confronting Network Rail’s Country Images Special Edition 79

Derbyshire Antiques

by Maxwell Craven

Official Derby Medals & Tokens

W

ith the perfection of Boulton & Watt’s steam press and its wide availability by the 1820s, it became possible to mark important occasions by the striking of a medallion. Medallions are numismatic pieces not designed to be worn, unlike medals which were.

Now commemorative medallions go right back to Roman times: their most famous in a British context, being that struck in gold by the Tetrarchs (Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantine the Great’s father Constantius I) to celebrate the restoration to the Empire of the British provinces after the defeat of the usurper Allectus.

They were revived in the Renaissance, examples being struck all over Europe, even by the celebrated Benvenuto Cellini and mainly celebrating state occasions and invariably in precious metal at first, but increasingly in copper.

The only Derbyshire example I can call to mind is one struck in silver to mark the centenary of the so-called Glorious Revolution on 4th November 1788, an example of which I must confess never to have seen.

The steam press, combined with improvements in metallurgy made it possible, in the 19th century especially, to reduce the cost of production, thus to extend medallion acquisition down from their elite to everyone and Municipalities took up the opportunity with some alacrity. The 1851 Great Exhibition accelerated the trend, issuing a commemorative medallion in various metals, and prize medals too, for a vast number of exhibitors’ categories.

Selection of local medallions: Left to right Top row: 1. Sir Alfred Haslam, 1891, white metal.

2. St. Michael’s Church 1858 (46mm).

3. Samuel Plimsoll MP (Derby) ‘coffin ship brass medalet 1876.

Second row: 4. Sir Edwin Anne, 1906 Royal Visit (for Agricultural Show and unveiling of Queen Victoria’s statue).

5. 1900 Golden Jubilee of the Derby Co-operative and Provident Society (the third such in the UK) 32mm white metal with blood red ribbon.

6. 1920 Aluminium medalet 32mm celebrating the inauguration of the statue of Our Lady on the tower of St. Marys’ (since removed for safety reasons!).

Third row: 7. 1906 Sir Edwin Anne medallion, showing obverse, sovereign’s head.

8. 1933 Padley Chapel medallion, with conjoined vignette portraits of Venn. Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlam and the date July 24th 1588.

9. Large (45mm) white metal opening of the Museum and Library medallion with added suspension ring.

Fourth Row: 10. Alderman Samuel Whitaker 1887 Golden Jubilee medallion, 38mm version in white metal and drilled for a suspense.

11. Another, 32mm version in white metal, with suspense and gilt coloured pressed tin crown and pin as issued.

12. 1872 Royal Visit in white metal.

Issued by Mayor Sir John (‘Brassy’) Smith who modestly declined to put his name on it.

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Derby issued about ten official medallions and about the same number again are known issued privately. The first official one commemorated the Prince of Wales’s visit of 1872 and at 38mm was minted in copper and white metal, the latter being the cheapest to buy, mainly because it was an inexpensive alloy of lead, tin and antimony. This gave a polished ‘silver’ appearance but with little weight, but a tendency to oxidise down to a dull grey. Some came with a pin or ribbon so that you could wear them, making them, in effect, medals.

Medallions issued by Derby Mayors

Derby Mayors (usually out of their own pocket) issued medallions in 1879 (M.T. Bass MP opening of the free Library and Museum), 1881 &1882 (both by Sir Abraham Woodiwiss, in 1881 for Royal Agricultural Show visit and in 1882 prize medals for the opening of the Art Gallery), 1887 (Samuel Whitaker, Golden Jubilee), 1891 (two types, Sir Alfred Haslam for Queen Victoria’s state visit to lay the foundation stone of the DRI), 1902 (Abraham Woodiwiss, junior, Coronation), 1906 (Sir Edwin Anne, Royal Agricultural Show visit), 1911 (Sir Thomas Roe MP, Coronation), and 1919 (W. Blews Robotham, Peace).

Most of these were between 32 and 40mm in diameter and struck in copper or white metal. The white metal Peace medallion of Ald. Robotham came with a patriotic red, white and blue ribbon. The copper ones were normally cased. Some were also struck in silver for giving away to distinguished participants in whatever celebrations were on offer on that particular

occasion. The 1879 medal was also struck for sale in brass. The 1882 ones were also struck in silver and gold, whilst the 1887 ones came in two types, in one case the copper one being issued in gilt.

The photographers, W. W. Winter & Co., not willing to be left out in the wake of the 1882 exhibition at the Art Gallery opening, issued copper medallions for their 1888 Fine Art Exhibition, and in 1891 the Midland Counties Industrial Exhibition caused prize medallions to be struck in gilt or white metal, although the Derby Co-op Jubilee medallion was in white metal only for issue to members, but with a suitably crimson ribbon threaded through as hole in the top.

ANTIQUES & COLLECTABLES

Churches get in on the act Not to be outdone, churches got in on the act. St. Michael’s, Derby, issued a fine white metal medallion to mark the opening of the rebuilt church in 1858, and like many local churches and chapels, St. Michael’s issued Sunday School Medals using the same dies. When in 1927 Derby was made a Church of England Diocese and All Saints became the Cathedral, a medallion was struck in several different forms: silver (for the high ranking ecclesiastics and other VIPs), copper, brass and enamel and white metal along with a smaller copper or white metal version. They were not round, however, but vesica shaped (pointed oval) like Medieval ecclesiastical seals, the larger one being 77mm and the smaller half-sized, at 39mm.

Not to be out-done, the neighbouring Catholic church of St. Mary marked the 1928 restoration of its tower (and the installation of a statue thereon) by issuing a 32mm medallion, struck in aluminium, sale of which helped raise money to re-imburse the church. About the last local medallion struck before the habit was stopped in its tracks by the Second World War, was one to celebrate the restoration in 1933, of the chapel at Padley, in honour of the martyrs arrested there and condemned later at Derby in 1588. This was unusually small, being but 26mm and was struck in brass with integral suspense.

Above left: Abraham Woodiwiss jr., reverse of 1902 silver Coronation medallion in presentation box …and right: Another 1902 example (obverse), in white metal with presentation slip, patriotic ribbon and pin, but lacking box.

These and a few I haven’t mentioned, were almost all individually designed (although often using a Royal Mint obverse ‘head’) and struck, usually in Birmingham or London, by private firms. Sports and prize medals issued by local clubs, agricultural societies, sports associations, schools and colleges are rather different, for they are almost always engraved with the relevant information about the awardee on the reverse, with a standard ‘off-the-shelf ’ obverse. Their varieties are great and their variations almost infinite, but each one is unique on the strength of the inscription.

Collecting these does not need to be expensive, and there are plenty of minor variations to attract the keener amongst you. Nevertheless, an element of rarity does exist, especially with those struck in precious metal, where the numbers are probably in low double figures at best. One silver and one white metal 1879 medallion were offered for sale recently with a number of other local medallions, oddfellows’ and masonic examples, estimated at £150 to £200, but which included sufficient important items amongst them to attract a winning bid of £920!

Start collecting for just a few pounds Those with holes drilled in them are best avoided, this defacement having been relatively common, but which does nothing whatsoever for the object.

Normally, though, individual examples can be had for a pound or two, if white metal and dull, rising to £5 or so for one in extremely fine or better condition, and copper examples similar, if slightly higher, but if boxed, £20-£30 or so, depending on which one it happens to be. Silver examples however can approach the £50 to £100 mark.

Nevertheless, local medallions - and do not forget that I haven’t begun to look at those issued elsewhere in Derbyshire yet – are relatively inexpensive to collect and, as miniature works of art, are satisfying to own and eminently displayable.

Above left: Ald. Sir Thomas Roe MP 1911 copper Coronation medallion in presentation box …and right: Founding of Derby Diocese, 1927, copper and brass and enamel larger sized medallions.

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Derbyshire Antiques

by Maxwell Craven

The

Shacklock Family

I have mentioned before that signed furniture is a rarity. Especially, it would seem, in Derbyshire. Another exception is the prolific and multi-talented family of Shacklock of Stanfree. They made furniture, as well as clocks and watches, from the early 18th century until the mid-19th and beyond.

T

he first cabinet maker in the family was Francis Shacklock, son of another Francis, of Bolsover and Gertrude Stephenson his wife. The father had been born in Chesterfield, which is where the family first come to notice, in 1665. Francis was born in 1703 and would have finished his apprenticeship therefore in 1724 or thereabouts. He settled in Stanfree, a hamlet (later a mining settlement) north of Bolsover and just south of Clowne and was twice married, although his first wife Elizabeth died in 1726 giving birth to their daughter Dorcas. He re-married Margaret Littlewood at Clowne in 1735 and had a son, Francis, who succeeded him. In turn, Francis’s son of the same name (1765-1841) and the latter’s younger brother Godfrey (1768-1850) also became cabinet makers.

The first Francis also signed a long case clock with a square brass dial of c. 1750, so must have made clocks too. The grandson Francis was a clock case maker and cabinet maker, who worked from 1790, whilst his brother Godfrey made the movements. Godfrey also made decent verge watches, of which at least one example has been noted.

...the case was a cracking one, handsome and beautifully made Above: Regency chair by Francis Shacklock [M. Craven] Left: Long case clock by Francis & Godfrey Shacklock [Hamptons]

A classic example of one of Godfrey’s later clocks (c. 1810) recently was for sale, a 7ft 7in tall mahogany long case. Whilst the dial was a painted one with floral spandrels and a derelict church beside a sheet of water in the arch – all very typical of the period – the case was a cracking one, handsome and beautifully made, from the hands of brother Francis. It had shield shaped cross-banding to the base, oval similar to the trunk door, canted corners and triple pillars to the trunk, the hood having a swan neck pediment with brass paterae, centred with a brass eagle finial and supported on fluted columns with cast brass Corinthian capitals. Essentially the case is far superior to the clock! Both were signed Shacklock/Stanfree, the case in the door edge at the bottom.

Francis also made chairs (and no doubt other domestic furniture), a particularly enjoyable mahogany one having come my way a few years ago dating from c.

1820, signed on the inside of the seat rail. The design of the back is wonderfully eccentric, but at the same time unusual and enjoyable. I paid £12 for it, but had its condition been better it would have merited £50 with its signature.

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Francis had a brother, John, whose son Abraham (1791-1878) was also a cabinet maker, latterly in Chesterfield, and his son Godfrey (1821-1880) was godson of his great uncle, the clockmaker, and the apprentice of his other great uncle, the cabinet maker, from 1835 to 1841. Godfrey also signed his furniture, and a pair of Gothic side chairs in faux mahogany from a Derbyshire church was sold a few years ago bearing the signature, hidden by the overstuffed seat, G Shacklock/Stanfree. They were not in very good condition, and made £25.

An exuberant monster of oak and mahogany Yet Godfrey clearly had ambitions, for he also submitted a chair to the Great Exhibition of 1851. This exuberant monster of oak and mahogany stood 8ft tall and was profusely carved with the coats-of-arms of the sovereigns of England and the principal orders of chivalry. The catalogue (class 26. No. 29) remarks that he both designed and made this monster and that he was entirely self-taught. The mixture of styles would be had to categorize in a catalogue and one wonders what happened to it.

In 2004 Bamfords offered for sale an oak breakfront sideboard by Shacklock estimated at £800 to £1,200. The panelled back was carved with the coat of arms of the county and agricultural trophies, incorporating the date 1853.

The base was gadrooned with a drawer and recessed panelled cupboard flanked by other cupboards, a similarly panelled one being a cellaret flanked by acanthus and bellflower consoles, all on a 91in wide plinth and signed Godfrey Shacklock/cabinet maker/Castle Street/Bolsover/Derbyshire. It was by no means a beautiful object, but if I recall, came in within estimate.

So someone must have had a dining room large enough to accommodate this behemoth! No doubt the commission had been a spin-off from the Great Exhibition chair.

‘Last orders’ for the Shacklock family of Stanfree

Above: Gothic chair by Godfrey Shacklock [M. Craven] Left: Watch by Godfrey Shacklock [Private collection]

Shacklock family cabinet making seems to have died with Godfrey in 1880. A cousin, son of the cabinet making Francis, for many years ran the Royal Oak at Stanfree. Unfortunately he lost his licence in 1859. The newspaper report of his application to have his licence restored ran: The licence had been taken away from the landlord, an elderly man named Francis Shacklock, two years ago after he was found by the local policeman to be serving several persons of “suspicious character”. Mr Shacklock had thought they were travellers and only served them small amounts but this had not appeased the Magistrates and the license had been revoked. At that time Mr Shacklock had begged the court to grant his licence as it was the only way he could gain a livelihood. Again, the court were still not prepared to grant a licence and poor old Mr Shacklock left saying it was “a very hard case”.

A pity the old boy did not have the family skill to fall back on.

Country Images Special Edition 83

Derbyshire Antiques

by Maxwell Craven

Curiouser and curiouser!

Complete curios are always fun, and at Bamfords they have had their share, Heaven knows.

Last year they sold a mummified mouse with a splendid local provenance.

The unfortunate creature had crawled into the tomb of the 3rd Duke of Portland at Bolsover and expired inside his skull, being recovered at the burial of His Grace’s successor many years later. It was then carefully preserved, encased in a nice little glazed case and equipped with a resume of the tale ending up in their saleroom last summer, where it fetched £360.

The other day I had the pleasure of valuing something equally eccentric, although unlike the mouse, not unique, merely rare: a lock of the hair of the Emperor Napoleon I. The immediate provenance was local and it will be sold in Bamford’s coming Fine Art Sale starting on 8th July. It comes mounted and framed (in relatively recent times) along with a letter of authentication from John P. Steele dated October 1822 and a further letter (this time in French) on the reverse from one Arnaud Beaunier further attesting to its validity. I take Beaunier to be a close kinsman of Louis Antoine Beaunier, Napoleon’s Inspector of Mines, Mr. Steele writes:

The framed certification for the Napoleonic relics

‘M. Granville (with whom, as with M. Beaunier, I have the honor of being acquainted) – was the intimate friend of M. & Mme. Constant & not very long prior to Napoleon’s leaving Paris to take the command of the army destined to invade Russia, he expressed to Constant a wish to possess some of the hair of his Imperial master.

‘The first time after that Constant cut it, he presented his friend with a quantity. One day, M. Beaunier obtained a few locks from M. Granville and on the evening of that day I was fortunate enough to possess a little of the same. On that occasion I was also presented with a portion of one of the ribbons attached to ‘The Order of the Iron Crown’ actually worn by Buonaparte in his Italian campaigns.’

M. Beaunier’s note reminds us that Louis-Constant Wairy (1778-1845) invariably known as ‘Constant’ - was Napoleon’s premier valet de chambre ‘and the only person ever allowed to cut his hair’ He deserted his master in 1814, and the Emperor’s return for the Hundred Days threw him into a ‘phrenzy’ – as well it might! M. Granville is likely to have been Pierre Joseph Marie ( Jonathas) Granville (1785-1839), a Haitian Napoleonic Colonel turned diplomat.

The Imperial strands of hair 84 Country Images Special Edition

Quite how John Phillips Steele acquired the relic is not made clear. He was

Portrait of Emperor Napoleon I as King of Italy by Andrea Sappiani

a scion of an old Cumberland family whose father Daniel had gone out to Jamaica as a merchant and it was at Kingston there that he was born in October 1794. By 1817 – perhaps after service in the army or navy – he was in Liverpool, always a haven for West Indies merchants, where he married Isabella Waterton at St. George’s church on St. Valentine’s day. They lived on the sequestered edge of the City at Walton Hill where their only child, John, was born later that year, and it was from one of his numerous children that the item had clearly descended.

I counted something like ten or a dozen strands of hair, but I was a little puzzled by the ribbon of the Iron Crown, for when Napoleon founded the order, on his occupation of Italy and acclamation as King, it had a yellow/ gold ribbon edges green. However the ribbon in the frame is white/silver edged black. It is only when one uses a little computer trickery that the true colours spectrally emerge!

This contrasts with another eccentricity which Bamfords sold three months ago in March. This was a personal letter from Senator Robert Kennedy – written on US Senate notepaper and dated 31st May 1966 – granting permission for Ind Coope’s Wardwick Brewery to name a new pub they were building in Chaddesden after his assassinated brother, the late president Kennedy. It was clearly typed personally, for more erasing fluid had been expended in making corrections than would have been occasioned by a secretary and was also signed MS in full.

The letter had been framed up and hung in the John F. Kennedy pub when it opened in 1967. It was never a thing of beauty, and after an attempt to sell it in 1993, structure was finally declared redundant and sold for demolition (to build houses) in 1995, and the site is now covered by John F Kennedy Gardens. At this point the letter was rescued and finally found its way to Bamfords to be sold. On the day, it cleared its upper estimate of £400 by a respectable margin making £450.

The Riband of the Order of the Iron Crown

Above: The letter from Robert Kennedy Left: Senator Robert F. Kennedy

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William Purdy and his lamp Portrait, c. 1910, of William Purdy [Bamford’s Ltd.]

Derbyshire Antiques

by Maxwell Craven

Until the 19th century, coal mines were lit by candles, which generally gave a good light, but which flickered or went out in sudden gusts of wind, prevalent in mines due to the vagaries of ventilation.

There was also a serious danger if there was a build-up of methane, an inflammable gas, colloquially referred to as firedamp which, on contact with a naked flame, would explode violently.

In May 1812 the 92 fatalities of the Felling Pit disaster stimulated research into safer ways of lighting the mine and in November 1815, both Sir Humphrey Davy, Bt., FRS and the steam engineer George Stephenson demonstrated miner’s lamps of their own devising, although in 1813, another device called the Clanny Lamp had been demonstrated by William Allen, but had been considered impractical.

Both Davy’s and Stephenson’s lamps (which relied on various amounts of metal gauze to separate the flame from the surrounding air, which consequently gave much inferior light) were considered a success, although Davy’s was better at detecting the presence of gas build-ups, Stephenson’s (otherwise affectionately known as the Geordie lamp) gave better light.

Yet neither was wholly satisfactory. However, as early as 1818, an explosion at Wallsend Colliery demonstrated that in certain circumstances the flame could pass through the Davy lamp’s gauze with fatal results. Furthermore, both types could be opened for forbidden activities like re-lighting or to revive a miner’s clay pipe, a common occurrence. One may complain about ‘ealf an’ safety’ these days, but when discussing mine safety, you can certainly see where they’re coming from!

Brass Purdy patent miner’s lamp, 8in tall, piece of glass from burner gallery missing [Bamfords Ltd.] 86 Country Images Special Edition

Last month we saw that John Davis of Derby began to make Clanny type and later Davy style miner’s lamps from the mid-1840s, widely used (although today relatively rare) despite their shortcomings in practice. In 1873 the Protector Mining Safety Lamp came into use and evolved into the GR6S

Left: Purdy Patent Miner’s Lamp. Patent drawing [Bamfords Ltd,] Right top: Mounted display of the steel dies from which the images of the six medals Purdy had been awarded were printed, along with the image of his lamp, 9 x 103/4 ins. [Bamfords Ltd.] Right bottom: Poster advertising Purdy’s invention, illustrating the medals and awards it had won to 1886 and informing the public that the lamps, their accessories and other equipment might be had from Purdy 12 x 16ins overall, framed but not glazed. [Bamfords Ltd.]

Garforth miner’s lamp - still based on Sir Humphry Davy’s design - and still the approved method of checking for firedamp in UK mines (those that survive). It is also known as the Eccles lamp. And it is its use for testing, that has enabled it to survive in much greater numbers than all the previous ones that were supplanted by electricity. An Eccles Protector miner’s lamp can be bought in good condition for between £50 and £75 any day. Early lamps and specialist lamps, however, are much more expensive.

William Purdy’s improved version A Derbyshire example was developed by William Purdy. Having had experienced life below ground in Derbyshire and being an intensely practical man, invented an improved lamp – one of many being evolved at that time. Purdy’s lamp, patented in 1879, was a development of the Geordie lamp. A gallery with gauze provides the inlet; above the glass is a chimney with perforated copper cap and gauze outer lid. A brass tube protects the upper works, shields them and keeps them locked in position by a sprung pin. The pin can only be released by applying a vacuum to a captive hollow screw; not something that a nicotine starved miner could manage at the coal face.

To accompany his invention, which met with modest success, Purdy published An Essay on Colliery Explosions and Safety Lamps (Colliery Guardian, London, 1880). This set out 16 advantages of his lamp over its predecessors but, despite a further nine patent lamps being developed, electricity gradually rendered them obsolete from the end of the century.

An electric miner’s lamp had been invented in 1859 and Swan’s lamp tried with success from 1881, with electricity becoming widespread in mines by 1900 and universal by 1930.

Purdy Lamps are consequently quite very rare, the only other one publicly known being in the Durban House Heritage Centre at Eastwood, Notts., the mining village where William Purdy had been born to Francis and Jane Purdy on16th March 1843 - forget D H Lawrence: Purdy’s their real hero!

He had a long career in the coal industry and died at Eastwood on New Year’s day 1928.

An example of his lamp and accompanied by a portrait of the great man, a poster and some other related items were offered in Bamford’s spring sale of this year with an estimate of £4,000 to £6,000, whereas a Clanny lamp, a Geordie (Davy) one, and a Hepplewhite Gray Ashworth’s Patent were all estimated at £100-150. Davis’s products, as we saw last month, also go within this more modest £100-200 price range.

Country Images Special Edition 87

Derbyshire Antiques

by Maxwell Craven

The Instruments of John Davis of Derby

Davis Clanny Miners’ Lamp

The Davis instrument making business began in Derby on a permanent basis when in 1843 John Davis (1810-1873) acquired the premises in Iron Gate now known as Haslams.

This had a purpose built workshop behind, vacated

by John Whitehurst III in 1834, with whom Davis was to be in competition until the Whitehurst firm closed in 1862.

Y

et the connection between this peripatetic family of Jewish instrument makers and Derby appears to have gone back further.

The records of pupils taken on by the school in Green Lane run by Herbert Spencer’s non-conformist father includes John (attended 17881794), David (1789-1798), William (1775-1799) and Miss Davis (17941796), offspring of Henry Davis, to be identified with an instrument maker of this name later working at Macclesfield Street, Soho, London. He was succeeded by son David by 1825, and William set up with John in business in Liverpool, although the latter later moved to fashionable Cheltenham.

How they came to choose Spencer’s Academy is an aspect of the pull of the Derby Enlightenment which remains a mystery.

John Davis of Derby was the nephew of one Gabriel Davis, established in 1779 in Leeds. Gabriel was a brother of Henry, of Soho, and the father of our John must have been the John who was educated in Derby, who we know was based in Thame, Oxon, at the time of his birth, the record of which has long proved elusive. The fact that John married and in 1842 set up in business initially in Cheltenham seems to point to the elder John as his father.

To back-track, however, it is necessary to record that the 14 year old John in 1824 became apprenticed to J. Abrahams, who was Instrument Maker to the Duke of Wellington. Upon completion of his apprenticeship, he moved to Leeds to join his uncle Gabriel’s business. Prior to 1830 it was customary for skilled makers to rent a shop in a town and then move on to another, covering perhaps ten towns in a circuit. John Davis followed this trend, making his first visit to Derby in April 1830, where he set up a temporary 88 Country Images Special Edition

shop in Rotten Row where he remained for six weeks. For the next few years, John visited Derby at regular intervals staying for a few months at a time, advertising his visits in the Derby Mercury.

At first he made domestic instruments. A number of elegant stick barometers signed by him, at Derby are known, and fetch prices of around £400-700 depending on their quality. But soon he was manufacturing a variety of surveying instruments such as theodolites, surveying dials and miner’s dials, responding from 1840 to the fast-expanding extractive industries of Derbyshire.

John became the father of ten children, including seven sons. His two eldest sons, Frederick and Alfred, were both trained as civil engineers. Upon his death in 1873, his third son Henry Davis was appointed by his brothers to run the business.

The Davis signature

Instruments can be things of beauty too - beautifully made and engineered.

Right: Biram’s patent anemometer & dial Below left: Hedley patent compass Below right: eight inch protractor in box

Back in the 1840s, however, he was approached by Benjamin Biram, steward to Earl FitzWilliam on the Wentworth Woodhouse estate in Yorkshire, which was rich in well-run coal mines. His patent anemometer, to measure the flow of air in mines was taken up by Davis, who advertised the first for sale in the Mercury on 12th February 1845. These had silk covered lightweight six inch impeller, set inside a cowling, with a one and half inch silvered dial bearing two chapters, to record wind speed in revolutions, in tenths and hundredths. One was recently sold, the dial marked Davis/Derby/Biram’s 143 Patent for £225 retail.

This led to a diversification into mining equipment. The firm’s domestic mercury tube barometer were put into robust oak arched-top cases for use at pit heads, and in 1850 Hedley’s miner’s compass had been patented and was also in production A little earlier the firm also commenced making Clanny miner’s lamps (the bonneted version developed by Davis especially) and standard Davy-type ones soon followed. These are rare, and often command higher prices than the more sophisticated instruments simply because there is still a great deal of nostalgia for the old mining days, of which the lamp is a universal symbol. Certainly Davis examples tend to be amongst the more expensive, in good condition invariably going for over £100 – often well over.

In 1871 the firm moved to new premises on the corner of Amen Alley and Full Street, where they remained for almost exactly a century until being taken over and moved to Alfreton Road. The company later pioneered the use of electric miners’ lamps and other applications of electricity underground. It continues to this day under the name of Davis (Derby)

Ltd. who now specialize in electronic equipment for hazardous and demanding environments.

It is the firm’s 19th century products which are the most collectable, and they constitute a considerable range of devices, all beautifully made and engineered. Instruments can be things of beauty, too. I bought an early anemometer needing some TLC four years ago in a general sale at Bamfords for £35 and, repaired, it should now command an estimate of £70-90 at auction. Nor are instruments that expensive. My Davis & Son/ Derby brass eight inch circular protractor in its original mahogany box should not cost more than £60 or so at auction.

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DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES:

by Maxwell Craven

Crich Manor House

Above: The 18th century (or earlier) estate painting, detail showing the house [Private collection].

Left: Photography of the house c. 1936 [Private collection]

Crich is really rather a confusing place, not least in respect to its country houses. The descent of the manorial estate since Hubert Fitz Ralph, the Domesday proprietor has been something of a saga, and many of the subsequent lords were nonresident. This phenomenon certainly would have put paid to the original manor house, built, as one might reasonably expect, beside the church.

Quite when it was built is not really known. Hubert was a tenant-in-chief of the Crown and was described in several documentary sources as ‘of Crich’ or ‘Lord of Crich’ which would suggest that he was probably seated there. There is, however, some room for doubt as he held 25 manorial estates in Derbyshire alone, of which only eight had recorded sub-tenants holding under him in 1086.

90 Country Images Special Edition

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES

5. Photograph of the house c. 1900 [S. Worboys]

Hubert’s father was a Norman called Ralph de Ryes, and a younger branch of the family were the Ryes of Whitwell. As there is a field to the NW of the church at Crich called Hall Croft, it would seem safe to conclude that this is where one of the FitzRalphs built their capital mansion, although it is not mentioned in any document until it had passed via an heiress in 1218 to Ralph de Frecheville. He certainly, therefore, lived at Crich, but his son, Anker, married the heiress of the much richer manor of Staveley and re-located thence. At this juncture, the house at Crich may have been used either as a dower house or by younger members of the family.

Eventually, the Frechevilles decided they no longer needed the manorial estate and sold it to Roger Belers of Kirkby Park, Leicestershire (hence Kirkby Bellairs) around 1301. They were a branch of the Norman family of d’Albini, so were much out of the same mould as the FitzRalphs.

They were also descendants of the FitzRalphs, as Alice de Wakebridge, Roger’s wife had Juliana, sister of a later Hubert FitzRalph of Crich for a mother. Although his son Sir Roger is also frequently described as ‘of Crich’, his brother

Thomas seems to have been the one that lived in the manor house.

Despite four wives, Sir Roger left only daughters, between whom the manor was split, but the elder, initially married to Sir Robert Swillington of Swillington, in Yorkshire, had a son, Sir Roger, who managed to re-unite the two halves of the patrimony. One of his two sons may have lived at Crich, but the family by and large remained in Yorkshire.

Eventually, both died without have had children, and the estate passed by marriage to Sir John Gray of Ingleby, Lincolnshire from whom it came to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Henry VI’s Treasurer, who already owned the South Wingfield estate.

Thus Crich became for nearly 150 years, part of the extensive holdings of the Cromwells and their heirs the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury. It was without doubt from this point (1467) that the original manor house would have disappeared.

The patrimony of the Shrewsburys was eventually split three ways amongst his daughters, on the death of the 6th Earl in 1616, Two thirds of the

manorial estate were sold off by their descendants, a third in 1660 to a group of seven rich local farmers, and another third in 1710 to William Sudbury. From these, the manor was rapidly split into a number of small freeholds.

Nevertheless, under the long sequence of absentee chief lords, there were families who held sub-tenancies of parts of the estate, Anthony Babington of Dethick (the plotter) being one.

Just prior to his fall, trial and execution, probably in anticipation of the possibility of the plot to free Mary Stuart failing, he off-loaded some of the family holdings, including an estate at Crich, held under Lord Shrewsbury.

So it was, that in 1584, John Clay, grandson of another John, who held a modest but lead-rich estate at Chappell in Crich, purchased this Babington tenancy, by this date a rich one, through the exploitation of its minerals. He twice married well, obtained a grant of arms at the Heralds’ Visitation of 1569 and died in 1632, by which time he had built himself a manor house, thought to be the one visible on the celebrated early 18th century panoramic painting bought by Country Images Special Edition 91

Crich Manor House

Above: Tudor’s view of the house as rebuilt. [M Craven] Below: Ceiling boss from the ceiling [Private collection] Right: Tudor’s picture of the Baroque ceiling [M. Craven]

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the late Col. Denys Bower of The Grove and now at Chiddingstone Castle in Kent.

Here we see a stone built L-plan house of two storeys and attics, the gables being coped with ball finials on the kneelers.

The windows are clearly mullioned and the house is set in a garden on the SW and a farmyard on the SE with a range of outbuildings to the north. It much resembles houses like Goss Hall in Ashover, Rowtor in Birchover or Allen Hill at Matlock. John Clay’s monument in Crich church establishes that his two sons William and Theophilus, died before him and his daughter Penelope married Thomas Brailsford of Seanor in Ault Hucknall, not far from Hardwick, who duly inherited what amounted to an extensive estate.

One of their eight sons was duly named Theophilus after his uncle and the eldest John after old Clay himself.

It seems unlikely that the Brailsfords altered the house and it was taxed on six hearths in 1670 when it appears to have been let to the Wood family, the Brailsfords being still ensconced at Seanor. Towards the end of the 17th century (certainly before 1712) it passed to the Flint family of Crich and they seem to have rebuilt the house fairly extensively. This seems to have taken the form of demolishing the cross wing and extending the hall range by three bays, but in a fashionable classical style, with vertical mullioned and transomed cross windows (later adapted as sashes). A new entrance was included where this new range joined the 16th century or early 17th century work, so that to the left there was this new two storey range, and to the right the old three bays, which included the original attics. Hence the windows were lower, with a considerable amount of blind eaves above the first floor ones, albeit with an oculus over the bay to the right of the door. The original end gable also suffered much refenestration, and gained two further oculi above the two-light mullioned windows in the attic.

These alterations must have been done after 1728, the approximate received date of the estate painting, and included rusticated quoins at the angles to give a more classical air. Inside the only hint we have is a view of the ceiling in the main reception room, which was of typically provincial Baroque stucco forming a single coffer centered on a roundel set in a cruciform pattern with ornamental panels on each side, rather like a contemporary one at Tupton Hall. A boss

from it survives. The date of the ceiling might suggests one somewhat earlier than 1728, so the estate painting may need to be re-dated to c. 1690/1700. In the room above, apparently, there was a frescoed overmantel with a riot of fruit and foliage..

Thomas Tudor in his 1926 epic High Peak to Sherwood wrote: “The Crich Manor House just below Edge Moor, known in more recent times as the ‘Pot House’ had a room in it called the ‘Queen’s Room’. This had an ornate plaster ceiling and elaborate wall panelling and, it was said, was prepared to receive Mary when she escaped from Wingfield Manor.”

The above remarks about the date of the ceiling render the tale about Mary, Queen of Scots entirely spurious, and the Babington connection is reflected in the tale, albeit rather back-to-front. He also added that it was “…A rather stylish old place of eighteenth-century characteristics, with a beautiful plaster ceiling, sometimes called Crich Manor House.”

Sometime in the mid-18th century Thomas Dodd acquired the house and began the manufacture of earthenware pottery, leading to the building being called the Pot House.

He went bust in 1763, and the house, stock, works and grounds were sold by auction, the advertisement reading: “A large commodious Dwelling House…together with the Garden walled round, and planted with Wall Fruit, and a Summer House within; and all the Outhouses, Barns and Stables, Cowhouses, Workrooms, Pot furnace, Warehouses, and other Edifices thereto belonging….”

of Shakespeare, was reduced to fraud in the wake of the family’s financial problems and was arrested at the house in 1777.

The potworks were bought separately and continued by George Bacon, succeeded by his son, Edward, who eventually turned the works into a brickworks, which closed about 1810. The pottery made was supposed by Llewellyn Jewitt to have resembled Brampton salt-glazed stoneware, but he (writing some 150 years ago) had never actually seen any.

It was then bought by John Saxton, a farmer, but described in documents as ‘Gent,’ suggesting a superior status. He seems to have sold some of the grounds for house-building. He was succeeded by his son Leopold Richardson Saxton around 1850 and by the 1870s only his widow lived there but a mortgage foreclosure led to its being transferred to John Holmes of the Moorwood Moor Colliery who offered it for sale with 16 acres in 1875.

In 1891 it was occupied by a mysterious William McCheane but it was thereafter sold to Vaughan Taylor, who farmed at The Mount and also ran a butchery. He sold to the Moores, farmers at Westhouses, who let it in 1910 to retired electrical engineer George Frearson, who rather daringly put in electricity and farmed the 47 acres.

At some stage after this, it is thought in the 1950s, the house seems to have been demolished and a new house built approximately on its footprint. If it did last until the 1950s, it is astonishing it never got onto the statutory list, but I can find no trace of it in the original county greenback.

As a footnote, it is worth noting that another so-called manor house, more likely that of the Beresford family, who were stewards to Lord Shrewsbury, stood in the Market Place. In the 17th century under Hon. Henry Howard as joint Lord of the Manor, it was the house of his man Ralph Smith whose descendant sold the much reduced and rebuilt remnant to the local Baptist congregation to build a chapel in 1874. This house was never properly recorded and thus it is impossible to assess the highly dubious claim that it was of 14th century origin. That it was the house shown in Denys Bower’s painting seems highly unlikely.

The Dodds continued at the house and Dr. Dodd, a son, contemporaneously well known as the former tutor to Lord Chesterfield and the author of The Beauties

Country Images Special Edition 93

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES:

by Maxwell Craven

Last month I wrote of an extraordinary house designed by the Derby amateur architect, banker, tax official and serial Mayor of Derby Alderman Richard Leaper (1759-1838), Mill Hill. Poor Leaper’s oeuvre has suffered rather badly from 20th century demolitions, however, so I thought we ought to look at another of his lost houses whilst the tale of Mill Hill was still fresh in our minds.

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DERWENT BANK Darley Abbey

D

erwent Bank, which was originally called Darley Grove, was built by an emergent Derby industrialist on an eight acre park that had been carved by sale from part of the parkland of Darley Hall, Darley Abbey. This had originally been landscaped

by William Emes, a locally based follower of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in 1778 for Robert Holden, so this new house enjoyed a ready-made mature mini-park from the hand of an acknowledged master.

…a stone mansion with a portico Derbyshire historian Stephen Glover, writing in 1831, could only describe the house itself as a “stone mansion with a portico”, but sale particulars of 1834 refer to it as a “delightfully situated and commodious freehold residence”. It was situated a little further up the Duffield Road out of Derby from Highfields (a surviving work by Leaper, currently for sale) and on the other side, on a scarp overlooking the river. The land was sold in 1824 to silk manufacturer Thomas Bridgett (1766-1833), who engaged Leaper, a friend and a fellow parishioner, to design it.

Bridgett (despite of the spelling, which he himself had changed) was a scion of the house of Bridgart, long builders in Derby. In the late 18th century, the building business of Joseph Pickford’s long-time associate Abraham Denstone had passed to his grandson John Bridgart, son of his daughter Keziah and Seth Bridgart, a framework-knitter.

Above: Derwent Bank, West (entrance front), from a postcard of .c 1905 [M. Craven]

John, carried on the building business founded by the Denstones, buying a former bowling green by the Wheel Inn, Friar Gate, in March 1839 where the firm’s headquarters were thereafter set. The business passed – on the extinction of the Bridgarts – to Joseph Parker, an ex-employee in 1887. This firm continued on the site until the retirement of its last proprietor, Howard Parker in 1969, embodying over two centuries of tradition of high quality building and craftsmanship, a remarkable survival from the era of the Midlands Enlightenment.

Brook Street Mill Of this family, builder William Bridgart had had a rich uncle. This was Thomas Bridgart, who started, like William, as a humble framework-knitter. Yet, by his own efforts, he became first a hosier then a silk-throwster and a phenomenally successful one at that. His Brook Street Mill was founded in 1807 and the pedimented eight storey ribbon mill

Above: Plan of the house, outbuildings, pleasure grounds and part of the park, 1852 [M. Craven]

Left: Very Revd. Fr. Thomas E Bridgett, OSB (1829-1899), Catholic Theologian and grandson of the builder of Derwent Bank [F. R. Denning]

Country Images Special Edition 95

DERWENT BANK Darley Abbey

Righ Below: Derwent Bank, Leaper’s summer house, photographed by Richard Keene before 1860 [Derby Museums Trust] Below: Derwent Bank, East (garden front). The creeper clad portion to the right is the extension put on by Edward Strutt [the late Jean Lander]

equalled Strutt’s fireproof calico mill in size. He also added a seven storey throwing mill, and a lower weaving mill. The ribbon mill is probably the first fireproof and undoubtedly the first steam powered silk mill in Britain. The complex continued as a silk mill before being adapted in the 20th century as a narrow tapes mill, which closed about 1995.

It can hardly be doubted that Thomas Bridgett’s nephew was the building contractor who erected Darley Grove/Derwent Bank. He also managed to outlive no less than five wives, the first two being solicitors’ daughters, linking him to a mayor of 96 Country Images Special Edition

…set on a rocky terrace overlooking gardens which cascaded down, almost to the Derwent.

Derby. His only son received a bronze medal for the firm’s products at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and one of his grandsons carried the business on. Another, the Very Rev Thomas E. Bridgett OSB (1829–1899) became a prominent Catholic theologian; a third, Ronald, was a diplomat.

The house presented a five bay façade to the west, rusticated lavishly up to the first floor sill band, and centered by a Doric portico. Panelled Doric pilasters rose from the rustication supporting entablature, cornice and low parapet. By being two and a half storeys, it looked quite two decades out of date, but the sale particulars state unequivocally that it was completed in 1825. The side facing the river was asymmetrical, having a very wide shallow canted full height bay to the left, again enclosed by pilasters, with a plainer recessed portion to the right embellished with a full height deeply curved bow and a later, lower, two storey wing beyond which broke forward again, the whole being set on a rocky terrace overlooking gardens which cascaded down, almost to the Derwent.

The same source tells us that the two main reception rooms, opening off the hall (which ran right through the house), were 25 by 20 feet with 12 foot ceilings and that the staircase was a cantilevered one of Hoptonwood stone with an elegant cast iron rail, probably supplied by the local firm of Weatherhead, Glover & Co., of Duke Street (later taken over

by Andrew Handyside). Both the hall and stairwell had “richly ornamented” ceilings. The main rooms boasted “rich cornices, fine marble chimney-pieces and mahogany doors”. From the galleried first floor landing there opened four bedrooms with dressing rooms and two water closets (no doubt working along the lines set out by John Whitehurst FRS at Clumber Park in 1774 and ‘improved’ upon by William Strutt, a neighbour at St. Helen’s House to the south, and Sheffield-born engineer Charles Sylvester.

Leaper also provided the park with a

delightful octagonal summerhouse embellished with cast iron trellis work (long vanished), a gardener’s cottage (now 208, Duffield Road and much mauled) and a lodge house.

Park) for building purposes, thus creating the late Victorian suburb of Strutt’s Park, now a leading Derby Conservation Area..

The house failed to sell at the auction, triggered by Bridgart’s death, in April 1834, but was bought by private treaty by Edward Strutt, MP (later 1st Lord Belper), William Strutt’s son and heir, in 1839. He re-named it Derwent Bank House, enlarged it to the North and East (in matching style), connected the parkland to that of St. Helen’s House and used the house as a roosting place for his unmarried sisters. To aid this, he had the house extended to the North. After the last sister Miss Frances had died in 1877, the house was offered by Lord Belper to Derby Corporation at £1,000 per acre (a very reasonable price then for building land), which declined to accept it. Instead it was let and later sold (1880) with seven acres to brewer W. H. Worthington, whilst the Strutts sold all the remaining land privately (the original 8 acres plus about 60 of St. Helen’s

Worthington’s daughter sold the house to Edward Chadfield, who very rapidly sold it on again in 1894 to Henry Freckleton Gadsby (son of former Derby Mayor John Gadsby) who moved it on again in 1903 to lace manufacturer William Fletcher.

On his widow’s death in 1922, it lay empty until sold to a medical charity two years later. The Medical Society seem to have had an idea to turn it into what we would today call a care home, as they did with Florence Nightingale’s old home, Lea Hurst, but eventually had second thoughts. It was therefore sold to James Millward & Co. of Belper, building contractors, who demolished it in 1926, to enable houses to be built on the site. A small part of the park was acquired

by Derby City Council and became Derwent Park, later being re-incorporated into Darley Park, ironically representing a return to the situation between 1778 and 1824.

Country Images Special Edition 97

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES:

by Maxwell Craven

Mill Hill House DERBY

Alderman Richard Leaper was an amateur architect and something of a phenomenon. The third son of Derby Alderman William Leaper, he was born 21st May 1759, and at an early age went into the family bank.

He also built up a tanning business and was appointed chief distributor of Government Stamps for Derby. He was elected to the Corporation becoming an Alderman in 1791, serving four times as Mayor of Derby, in 1794, 1807, 1815 and 1824. In 1829 Stephen Glover wrote of him: ‘He is the oldest magistrate of the Borough, and for his impartiality in the exercise of his magisterial duties, is universally respected by his townsmen…(He is) a gentleman who has had great taste and much experience in building family mansions.’

To three houses named by Glover as Leaper’s work, one can attribute eight other Derby villas, including Mill Hill House, and his own residence, Parkfields Cedars (burnt down 1967), all built between 1807 and 1827. He also did some country house work, including Newton House, Newton Solney, Barrow Hall, Barrow-on-Trent and probably Burnaston House, which I described fairly recently, not to mention Spa House (now Ye Old Spa Inne, Derby) and the long-vanished Agard Street Particular Baptist Chapel.

Above: The bow on the South front c. 1900 [M. Craven] Right: The house from Mill Hill Lane 1985 [M. Craven]

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It is likely that Leaper’s executant architect was Joseph Cooper and patronised the founders Weatherhead, Glover & Co., Duke Street, Derby for decorative ironwork.

Leaper died unmarried on 18th September 1838, and his heirs were the issue of his eldest brother William Leaper Newton of The Leylands.

Arlington Court, Devon, SW angle by Thomas Lea, 1824 [National Trust]

Mill Hill House was an early venture, built in a 25 acre park on the highest point to the immediate SW of Derby and quite close to the town. The client was a Londonborn banker, Thomas Ward Swinburne (1766-1825), a supporter of the Particular Baptist Chapel, Agard Street, Derby, to whom he gave a silver communion cup in 1807.

His wife Ann, whom he married in 1802, was the widow of a neighbour, Archer Ward (1744-1800) of Greenhill House, who had actually put up the money to build the Baptist chapel in Agard Street in 1794. Ann was the daughter of Revd. Richard Hooper, another Particular Baptist minister. More significantly, Archer Ward’s sister, Sarah, was Leaper’s mother. Thus, although Leaper’s authorship of this most interesting house is nowhere attested, the circumstantial evidence is very strong. The architectural evidence, though, is the clincher.

Built at an unknown date between 1810 and 1814, Mill Hill House, clumsily truncated since 1936 and demolished less than a decade ago, was a strangely boxy stuccoed house originally of five by four bays and two storeys, stuccoed with grooved rustication up to the plat band and with a similarly grooved parapet without a cornice, presumably representing a form of entablature, and implying an absent order of pilasters. The windows were set in surrounds with bracketed entablatures, and the south (garden front) was embellished by a single, very deep, curved full-height bay.

Belsay Hall, Northumberland from SE [National Trust]

The Leylands, Darley Abbey of 1824, SW angle in 1936 [ J H Richardson] Country Images Special Edition 99

Top Left: Soanian Plasterwork in the saloon 2005 [M. Craven] Bottom Left: The ceiling in the bow, ground floor dining room 2005. [M. Craven] Top Right: Detail of stair balustrade 2005 [M. Craven] Bottom Right: Nemesis 19th February 2006 [M. Craven]

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The architectural inspiration was derived from Sir Charles Monck Middleton’s extraordinary attempt at designing the sort of house he imagined that the Ancient Greeks would have lived in, Belsay, Northumberland (now NT), via a mutual friend, Sir William Gell FRS. A related house (by another architect, but for a man with a wife who was related to Leaper) was Arlington Court, Devon (also NT and much altered). Mill Hill was Leaper’s effort to give Northumbrian-born Swinburne a mini-Belsay. A decade later, Leaper built a remarkably similar pile, The Leylands, Penny Long Lane, Derby, for his brother, William Leaper Newton, his second attempt at a ‘Greek house’.

The interior of Mill Hill was extraordinarily compact, with a wide and shallow dogleg staircase rising from the excitingly top-lit entrance hall into an apse and with an elaborately carved mahogany rail supported by a chastely decorated cast iron balustrade.

The plasterwork was of a type associated with the interiors of houses by the great Regency architect – almost exactly contemporary with Leaper - Sir John Soane (1753-1837), most notably in the grand first floor drawing room into the bow. John and James Brookhouse of The Morledge, Derby, supplied the Roman Cement which covered the house and executed all the plasterwork.

The views from either side of the E-W ridge on which the house stood were at the time of building spectacular in the extreme, albeit today consisting of endless prospects of the roofs of lines of artisans’ cottages as far as the eye can see.

Yet in spite of his good intentions, Leaper’s exterior proportions were all wrong which, combined with its uncompromisingly rectangular outline, made it a hard house to love. In addition, its reduction – by the removal of the stable court and service wing c. 1905 and the west two bays of the main house to build a Christadelphian Chapel in 1936 – and subsequent indignities inflicted at the hands of the Knights of St. Columba, made it all the more unprepossessing, despite the unexpectedly fine interior.

The grounds were landscaped, to include the deep declivity north of Burton Road called Windmill Pit (where the Protestant martyr Joan Wast suffered an auto-da-fé in 1555) and included two magnificent tufa rock-eyes to the east of Swinburne Street, pitched through part of the park c. 1850.

In 1824, Swinburne bought the 655 acre Corndean Hall estate in Gloucestershire, where Leaper designed him a new house, but his client died before it was completed in 1826. However, his son Archer Swinburne moved there in 1827, dying in 1841, when the Derby property was sold. The tenant of Mill Hill from 1827, Mrs. Crompton, was the widow of Samuel Crompton III, the main proprietor of Leaper’s bank, whose large stuccoed Regency villa, Flower Lilies, Turnditch, Derbyshire, could also easily have been the work of his indefatigable junior partner.

Archer Swinburne died in January 1841, when his executors sold house and estate to Derby’s first postmaster, Capt. Thomas Parker Bainbrigge, a member of an old Derby family with an estate near Rocester, Staffs. He, like all subseuquent owners up to the 1920s, sold parcels of land from the park for building

Renals’ brother James (1807-1891) continued to live there until his own death. At his time the house reportedly sported a pair of fine wrought iron gates, thought to be the work of Robert Bakewell which were doubtless brought from elsewhere, possibly having been the pair from in front of All Saints’ church, now Derby Cathedral, which were removed for street widening in 1873 and sent for auction.

Statutory List having turned down by English Heritage in 2003, but in February 2006 this fine and architecturally important building was unceremoniously demolished, and the site is currently set to become a Mosque.

The house and the ever-shrinking demesne were sold to William Stokes, an elastic web manufacturer of Stokes & Hudson, Stockbrook Mills, Monk Street - easily visible from the north side of the house. He lived there from 1892 to 1907 and his wife is said to have disposed of the Bakewell gates and replaced them with a new set, more to her taste. These, too, have also long since vanished, perhaps victims of the Second World War scrap drive of 1941-42.

From 1907 dentist George Henry Goodwin lived and worked there but by 1925 the house had been sold to the Catholic charitable body, the Knights of St. Columba, whereupon it became the Columba Club. A decade later, in 1935-36, to pay for renovations, the Knights, in a remarkably pragmatic fit of ecumenism, sold the service yard and part of the house to the Christadelphians.

They demolished this part (very crudely and untidily) and built their chapel on the site in the latter year. Post war a remarkably ungainly porch was added to the East front.

In 2002 the Knights sold the house to a Littleover resident who used it for 18 months as a drinking club before selling it by auction in June 2004 for around £360,000, by then in an advanced state of decay. Derby Civic Society’s attempt to have the house added to the

Bainbrigge had been appointed postmaster at Derby on 14th February 1824 on his return from military service in India where, at Cawnpore three years before, he had married Eliza, daughter of Lt. Gen. Sir Dyson Marshall, KCB. His return was probably because his younger brother, Dr. Joseph Bainbrigge, had died that year unmarried, leaving him heir to his father’s estate.

Bainbrigge retired in May 1865 and died in 1870, when his executors sold house and surviving grounds to Nottingham-born Derby Alderman John Renals. The new owner was an unmarried vintner, being a founder-director of Renals, Orme & Co., who died in 1889 having served as Mayor of Derby in 1866-7. In his time an awkward looking square full height bay was added to the street front.

Country Images Special Edition 101

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES:

by Maxwell Craven

Drawing of the surviving cross-wing of Bradshaw Hall - 1790 [Derby Museums Trust]

If one parks one’s car in the car park in the centre of the historic village of Eyam, one cannot help but noticing the untidy and folorn ruin of a building, the remains sporting some low mullioned windows, the whole enveloped in weeds, nettles and a couple of small trees. Or at least that was the situation when I last visited. What one is seeing, however, is all that remains of one of the two major country houses in Eyam, Bradshaw Hall.

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Bradshaw Hall Eyam T

he story is a long and ultimately dispiriting one. The estate came to Richard de Stafford, believed to have been a younger son of Hervey Bagot alias de Stafford of King’s Bromley, Staffs., before the end of the 12th century. He received a confirmation from King John on his accession. It was a large manorial holding, rich in lead, and originally included Leam, which was separated from the main holding by bequest to Richard’s younger son Ingram de Stafford. It was, however, not long after amplified again by the marriage of the heiress of the de Eyam family, which had a section of the parish separate from the Staffords’ demesnes.

View taken in May 1982 of the remains from the car park

The Staffords undoubtedly had a capital mansion there – on the site of the car-park ruin – for it occurs in several Medieval charters. It is thought it was rebuilt in contemporary Tudor style by Humphrey Stafford, although the evidence for what he actually did to the structure is ambivalent. The thinking is that he rebuilt an existing great hall, and added a new cross-wing containing his private apartments. There may also have been a second cross-wing, for his family included five daughters.

Remains of Bradshaw Hall, May 1982, showing the interior of the wing that collapsed in 1962.

Nearly all the walls visible were once plastered (some remains) bar extreme left [M. Craven]

Unfortunately Humphrey left no surviving son, so on the death of his widow, she decided that her executors should ‘Dystrybute and equally devyde…[the estate - which included many holdings elsewhere than at Eyam] to my sayd children…’ It was actually divided between the husbands of the daughters, ladies being held in law to be incapable of inheriting property per se.

Thus the extensive lead-rich estates of Humphrey became divided up amongst John Savage of New Hall, Castleton, Rowland Eyre of Hassop,

Same view, but from the exterior. May 1982 [M. Craven]

Tapestry Room, Eyam Hall, 1990 [Eyam Hall] Country Images Special Edition 103

Francis Bradshaw of Bradshaw Hall, Chapel-enle-Frith and Rowland Morewood of The Oakes, Norton (now gobbled up by Sheffield) with one unmarried girl. One of these portions, later owned by Sir George Savile, included about half of Eyam, and the remainder of the Eyam holdings went to Bradshaw. Sir George sold his portion to John Wilson, who moved it on to Thomas Wright, a younger son of the Great Longstone Wrights who built the present Eyam Hall.

Thus in 1565 Francis Bradshaw, came into the property, which included lands at Bretton and Foolow as well as much of Eyam ‘including ye auncient manor house…’ Some have taken this wording to imply that Francis Bradshaw actually did the modernizing of the house and not Stafford, but that is perhaps not wholly relevant.

When it received the name of the family is not clear, but it is to be presumed that it came about when the present Eyam Hall was built in 1670.

Be that as it may, in 1635, George Bradshaw, newly inherited from his childless elder brother, set about building a new house, or at least rebuilding the existing one, to bring it up to the standards of the day and perhaps also to show off his standing. Rowan May of ARCUS, who undertook a brief survey of the remains for the Peak Park in 2006 suggested that Bradshaw added just a wing, but it seems to me that the works included substantially more than that.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, however, work, which had clearly proceeded rather gradually (a single wing would have long been done and dusted in the time-frame) stopped entirely. The problem was complicated when Bradshaw, in exile, died in 1646. The son and heir married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of John Vescy of Brampton Yorkshire, but died aged only 28 in 1659 before he could reclaim the hall at the Restoration, and it was left to his widow on behalf of their two sons.

Top: Woodcut of the surviving cross-wing by LL Jewitt, 1859 [M. Craven] Above: photograph of 1960, 18 months before the collapse [NMR]. All the windows bar the central light of that in the attic, have been bricked up to save on tax. A door has been made in the basement for access, and the stub wall of the main range had gone, leaving an ugly scar, by 1960.

Right: Highlow Hall, showing the unfinished gable, right (again, a Civil War delay) [Tony Alsop]

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We have no idea if work was resumed, but accounts inform us that the family moved back in, so we presume it was at least made habitable.

Unfortunately, their sojourn there was brief, for, on the outbreak of plague in the village in 1665, they removed themselves discreetly back to Brampton in Yorkshire – not to be confused with Brampton by Chesterfield, where there was, confusingly, another branch of the Bradshaw family.

Having done that, however, they never ever returned, although at first, they presumably left a bailiff or similar in residence to collect the lead revenues and oversee the estate, for it was assessed for Hearth Tax in 1670 on 7 hearths, which would imply that more than a single crosswing was then in use. That situation no doubt ended after the death of the last male heir John Bradshaw of Great Hucklow, in 1726, when the property passed to the Galliards of Edmonton,

Charles Jennens of Gopsal (Handel’s librettist for The Messiah) and thence to the Smiths of Ecclefechan in Scotland.

From grand hall to farm barn The house itself was at first let as a farmhouse, but some time in the mid-18th century was sub-divided as a tenement for ‘three or four families’. By 1791 it had been further reduced, many windows blocked up to avoid window tax, and was being used as a cotton spinning mill, but had become a barn by the mid-19th century.

Writing in 1862, the Eyam historian Peter Furness reported fowls roosting under collapsing Jacobean chairs and remarked of the by then largely deserted house that ‘…it was intended to be hung with tapestry, which came to the place but was never put up, and that an old man who was born in this part of the hall informed [Furness] that when as a child he saw the tapestry lie in a heap in a corner of the chamber where it rotted away.’

One suspects that it did not rot away entirely, for Eyam Hall boasts a Tapestry Room, no large space, but covered comprehensively in 17th century tapestry which was clearly not intended to be hung there, for it had been at some stage hacked about considerably to enable what we now see to fit and (to some extent at least) to make sense. It would seem highly likely therefore, that one of the 18th century Wrights probably struck a bargain with the factor of the Bradshaw estate and acquired what had not rotted away to embellish his own home!

The Wrights had the last laugh, in any case, for in 1883 the Wrights bought what remained of the estate, and the ruins of the hall (on which a carved stone Bradshaw armorial then remained visible) came with it.

There are not too many clues as to what the house looked like. The surviving cross-wing, which collapsed in a storm in 1962, had clearly not had its roof completed or had had it simplified when the place was down-graded to a farmhouse, as with the right hand wing of Highlow Hall, a contemporary house. The fact that the quoins end with a simple gabled roof without copings, suggests that originally it had a parapet, possibly battlemented, or embellished with curved merlons, as at Holme Hall, Bakewell. Indeed, the house might have been more ambitious than Eyam Hall, for it seems to have had mullion-

and-transom cross windows on the ground floor, whereas the later Eyam Hall has only mullions on its front.

Yet the first floor windows were unusually low, suggesting that there had been superior accommodation in the lost block to the left, possibly rebuilt by George Bradshaw as a tower house. But whereas Eyam has straight string courses over the windows, at Bradshaw Hall, there were only cranked hood-moulds. Making sense of what remains of the interior is hopeless, for much must have been stripped out during the cotton mill phase. Furness’s account however, would suggest it was at least intended to be grand.

The 2006 survey was done for the Peak Park, current owners, to assess the possibility of the listed ruin being brought back to life as a house.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, however, this idea may have become less attractive. One notes that similar thoughts about Sutton Scarsdale were entertained at about the same time. So, unless my absence from the site since I came up to do an Inside Out film on Richard Keene for the BBC in 2005, has seen some developments, the vestiges of what might have been a second spectacular 17th century house in Eyam will continue to moulder away, contributing, no doubt on occasion, to the beautification of peoples’ rockeries and such like.

Country Images Special Edition 105

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES:

by Maxwell Craven

Hasland House

Hasland, Chesterfield

Hasland is one of the many outliers of the Manor of Chesterfield, and was long held by the ancient family of Linacre, under whom it was, in the 15th century, tenanted by a cadet branch of the Leakes of Sutton Scarsdale. Thomas Leake of Hasland, for instance, was Bess of Hardwick’s maternal grandfather.

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Hasland House and village hall when new, c. 1914, with Markham’s fountain not yet filled. [Chesterfield Museum]

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fter the death in a duel in 1597 of another Thomas Leake, the succession to the estate was thrown into disarray and it was eventually acquired by Col. Roger Molyneux of the Teversal (Notts.) family, later a prominent Parliamentary officer but, ironically, he disposed of it shortly before the Civil war to a Royalist Capt.

John Lowe of Owlgreaves (now Algrave) Hall, second son of Anthony Lowe of Alderwasley – if only he’d known!.

The estate and house – the still extant old Manor House is written up in The Derbyshire Country House 3rd edition (Ashbourne 2001) Vol. II. pp.

277-8 – continued amongst their descendants

until in 1727 the heiress brought it to her husband (and kinsman) Henry Lowe of Park Hall, Denby, whereupon it was sold to the upwardly mobile Lucas family.

It seems to have been at this juncture that Hasland House was built in a small park immediately NNW of the village centre, presumably because the old hall was considered inadequate for more up-to-date requirements and was thereupon let as a farm.

Thomas Lucas alias Oliver was the son of Bernard (originally from Grindleford) and started out as a Chesterfield butcher being fined for operating without being a burgess in 1689. Nevertheless, thanks to him and his sons, the family swiftly became unconscionably rich.

It is not clear who actually built the house…

Below: Hasland House c. 1930, from a postcard [M. Craven] Bottom: Wingerworth Hall designed by Francis Smith

It is not clear who actually built the house. In 1727 Thomas was getting on and had a house elsewhere and it was more likely his second son, Bernard, who built a fine new brick house.

It was five bays wide on both main facades, of three storeys with a hipped roof behind a low parapet, the gauged brick lintels having triple stone keyblocks. There were plain pilasters at the angles and the entrance – surely aping the style of Francis Smith of Warwick – set in a stone surround crowned with a segmental pediment.

The fact that the roof was irregular, ending with a hip to the west but not to the east, might suggest that a fairly substantial earlier house with gables might have been rebuilt, rather than the house being entirely new.

Inside there were three excellent panelled rooms and a timber staircase of very fine joinery with three balusters per tread and carved tread ends.

From its style and appearance, the house must have been built within a year or two of Lucas acquiring the estate and it was later described as “a commodious and pleasant mansion”. It could even have been built to a design by the great Francis Smith, who was then building Wingerworth Hall not very far away for the much grander Hunlokes, but no building records appear to have survived.

Bernard Lucas (1708-1771) was Mayor of Chesterfield in 1741 and was succeeded by his son – another – Bernard, who died unmarried in 1810, and then by the latter’s younger brother Thomas (1731-1818). Thomas’s son, yet another Bernard, greatly increased his fortune by marrying Esther, sister and heiress of Anthony Lax (later Maynard) of Chesterfield, an opulent attorney with a Yorkshire estate and decided to build a new house again, not so far away. This is the present Hasland Hall, for many years now a

it could have been built to a design

by Francis Smith Country Images Special Edition 107

A community hall adjacent to the house

Top: Percy Houfton’s village hall today, with Bond’s Keeper’s house beyond on part of the site of the old house [M. Craven].

Middle: Hasland Manor. 16th century former capital mansion of the Hasland estate and home of the Leakes, but a farm from 1727 until about 30 years ago [Redbrik Estate Agents] Bottom: Philanthropic Chesterfield Alderman, George Albert Eastwood, who had been Mayor of Chesterfield, gave the house and grounds for a public park.

[Chesterfield Borough Council]

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The house was quietly cleared away in 1935 school, and Hasland House was let and later sold to Josiah Claughton, a Chesterfield druggist and wholesale chemist with 35 acres.

The Claughtons were thereafter in residence for almost the whole of the 19th century for, although Josiah died in 1836, his widow Elizabeth only died in1853 and four unmarried daughters – Jane, Catherine, Ellen and Fanny lived there until the death of Catherine, the last survivor, in 1895. Nobody, in all this time seems to have sought to alter or rebuild the old house, which appears nevertheless to have had much charm. The only exception seems to have been that during the Claughton regime, the three over four glazing bar sashes were replaced by plate glass ones with Victorian margin glazing bars, which did nothing for the appearance of the house.

The community hall was six bays long, the windows separated by buttresses, and boasted a broken pediment towards to park, a tall round headed window penetrating through its base.

Beneath was a Tuscan peristyle and the roof was crowned by a simple quadrangular domed lantern. The building was also connected to the house by a link lit by an oeuil-de-boeuf, indicating that a use was then envisaged for the old building. The architect was probably Percy Houfton (1873-1926), a talented exponent locally of the Arts-and-Crafts style.

the Great War it was announced to the Trustees of the park that the roof had been repaired but that it would need replacing in a few years.

After the traumas of the Great Depression, however, when that moment arrived, there was no appetite amongst the trustees to disburse so much expenditure, and the house was, instead, quietly cleared away in 1935 at a cost of £100; a considerable loss architecturally.

The present house on the site, a commendably restrained design, was built in 1936 for the Parkkeeper by Borough Architect C. Bond.

Unfortunately a role does not seem to have been found for the house itself, and not long after

The house was briefly let to Capt. Herbert Murray having been inherited by Catherine Claughton’s nephew Revd. Maurice Beedham, and then by his son, John, who was based in Canada and sold their house and modest acres in 1904. The purchaser was Chesterfield grandee Bernard Lucas, a descendant of the original Lucas owner in the 18th century, who paid £7,650. His tenant was another member of a notable local family, Eric Drayton Swanwick, second son of Russell Swanwick and grandson of Frederick Swanwick of Whittington Hall, the man who surveyed the North Midland Railway for George Stevenson (later of Tapton Hall) in 1838-1840.

Frederick also designed many of the buildings, the stations not done by Francis Thompson, and bridges on the NMR. E. D. Swanwick, however, later moved to the family seat, Whittington Hall, and Hasland House entered its last phase.

The house and only 15 acres of grounds were acquired in 1912 by the philanthropic Chesterfield Alderman George Albert Eastwood, who had been Mayor of Chesterfield over three successive years from 1905 to 1907/8. He was exceedingly wealthy and was the manufacturer of railway wagons. He gave the house and grounds for a public park, opened 2nd July 1913 in memory of his father, George Eastwood (18261910). The following year, former owner’s son Bernard Chaytor Lucas built a new community hall adjacent to the house, in front of which was positioned a rather fine fountain from the grounds of Ringwood Hall, given courtesy of Charles Markham who had lived at both Ringwood and Hasland Halls.

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TWO DALES AND A TRAIL

This walk takes in the beauties of one of the many faces of Dovedale, before climbing out by way of a tributary and as far as the upland village of Biggin. The village sits on the limestone plateau of the White Peak, one of those places that seem to be cut off from the frequently busy more popular tourist villages such as nearby Hartington. There are no gift shops but just one welcoming friendly pub, the Waterloo where it is easy to imagine some war weary soldier taking on the first licence after serving with the illustrious Duke of Wellington.

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‘the upland village of Biggin’ 7.5

MILES

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE WALK 7½ miles (12.1 km) of easy to moderate walking on clearly defined footpaths and minor roads.

Surface water can be encountered in Biggin Dale after prolonged rain, especially in winter.

RECOMMENDED MAP: OS 1:50,000 scale Landranger Series sheet 119; Buxton, Matlock and Dovedale. n.b This map is preferable to the usual 1:25,000 scale Explorer maps recommended for my walks, the reason being that the walk is on two sides of this map and anyone using it would be forced to struggle opening it, especially in a high wind!

PARKING: (pay and display) at Alsop Station signposted off the A515 Ashbourne/Buxton road, about six miles north of Ashbourne.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT: High Peak 442 service from Ashbourne runs at two hourly intervals from 10:36 on Sundays and Bank Holidays and from 10:05 the rest of the week.

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The partly wooded dale is followed, upstream to the obvious junction with Biggin Dale which is then followed all the way to its head and a minor road into Biggin. This road runs nearly arrow straight on its way through the village and is followed, until it is crossed by a bridge once carrying traffic on the railway line between Ashbourne and Buxton. An access path on the far side of the bridge climbs up to the track which is now used by the Tissington Trail, one of the two linking trails along abandoned railways.

17th-century author of the Complete Angler, Izaak Walton and his impecunious friend Charles Cotton fished the waters of the Dove and still found time to converse on matters setting the world to rights. Cotton lived at the now demolished Beresford Hall further upstream from our walk, but seems to have spent much of his time hiding from his many creditors. All that is left of the duo’s friendship, apart from the book, is a tiny cabin, a fishing temple briefly glimpsed by walkers on the opposite bank of the Dove, when passing Pike Pool. Regrettably the building is inaccessible and in any case is on strictly private land.

REFRESHMENTS: The Waterloo Inn at Biggin has a good bar menu - covered outside seating allows dogs to accompany their owners.

Biggin Hall offers traditional decor and time honoured country house ambiance. Also open to non-residents for meals.

The route is easy to follow, but only by heeding the note of caution spelled out later in the text. Starting from the car park on the site of the old station for Alsop en le Dale, it quickly drops down into the first of the two dales. Here Wolfscote Dale helps the tranquil River Dove on its timeless way to the Trent.

Country Images Special Edition 111

TWO DALES AND A TRAIL the car park cross the busy 1 From A515 and go down the minor road

reaching the junction with a 6 On side dale, turn left at the signpost to

do not cross but turn 2 Atrightthetobridge go down some steps to join

next signpost to Hartington 7 Atbeartheright away from it and continue

opposite. Turn right where it joins another road and walk down into the dale.

the riverside footpath.

past a pair of cottages and follow 3 Go the east bank of the river, upstream through intermittent natural woodland and open sections at the foot of the steep valley side.

The building on the opposite bank immediately above the bridge is the once water driven Lode Mill, where the locals brought their grain for grinding into flour. the tempting footbridges 4 Ignoring passed along the way; continue upstream as far as the obvious entrance into Biggin Dale.

right at the finger post and 5 Turn follow the dale, gradually climbing until it widens and where there is a three-way signposted footpath junction.

Biggin Dale is a nature reserve and time spent flower hunting especially in spring and summer will be well rewarded: look for the tiny alpine-like plants growing in crevices amongst the rocks.

A small cave-like opening on the right about a quarter of a mile along the dale was a trial opening for an unsuccessful lead mine.

The rocky dale bottom can become a stream during wet weather, but is generally drier further up.

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Hartington and go through a stile.

Continue along a grassy path for about 200 yards.

steadily uphill along the dale.

The small often green slimy pond over the wall on the left of the first signpost, is a man-made dew pond, providing drinking water for cattle and sheep in this normally dry pasture. past a small sewage works on 8 Go your left and climb out at the dale head to join a minor road.

right along this road for a few 9 Turn yards and then left on to the road

into Biggin. The Waterloo Inn is on your left about a quarter of a mile further on.

along the road through the 10 Walk straggling village as far as a bridge carrying the Tissington Trail.

on the far side of the 11 Immediately bridge turn left to climb the access

path. On reaching the trail, turn left, to follow it for about two scenic miles back to Alsop-en-le-Dale car park.

Biggin is one of those places where time has passed it by, but it does have a history, much of it recorded in its medieval church. During the English Civil War there was a skirmish nearby on Hartington Moor, but it seems to have been something of an inconclusive spat between cavaliers and roundheads.

The occasional cattle and sheep markets once the high spot in local

farmers’ weeks, seem to have disappeared, no doubt in favour of better services at Bakewell.

Quiet as it may have been, during WW2, Biggin was ‘invaded’ by hundreds of German soldiers, P.O.Ws who, as hostilities eased were employed on local farms and occasionally to dig out trapped vehicles, snow bound on surrounding roads, especially during the exceptionally severe

winter of 1947. Many of the soldiers in making the best of their captivity, became friends with local people and were generally well liked, especially for their help at harvest time. There is a tale about one who became something of an Anglophile and used the money he earned to buy a second-hand tweed jacket and a bicycle, which he used to visit local pubs and ride around the nearby lanes.

7.5

MILES

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Country Images Special Edition 113

A WALK BETWEEN

MONYASH AND SHELDON

This walks starts in Monyash, it crosses some of the prettiest fields in the Peak and then visits Deep Dale, an unspoilt dale full of wildflowers, before reaching Sheldon. In between is a walk over some of the highest ground in the White Peak, the limestone uplands where the views cover many miles and only the sound of skylarks intrude, if that is the correct word for such a welcome addition to an enjoyable day.

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‘a walk from Monyash’ 5.5

MILES

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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE WALK 5½ miles (8.8km) of easy field path walking with one short but steep climb of about 132 feet (40.25metres). Many stiles, mostly of stone which can be slippery if wet.

RECOMMENDED MAP: OS Explorer 1:25,000 scale map Sheet 24 – The Peak District, White Peak Area.

PARKING: Parking is mainly limited to roadside around Monyash, so please make sure not to obstruct entrances to private property or field gates.

REFRESHMENTS: Both a pub and tearooms are open in Monyash.

Below your feet the walk crosses the scene of lead mining activity in days gone by. With one notable exception, only humps and capped-off shafts remain; the one exception is Magpie Mine reached by a cat’s cradle of paths beyond Sheldon, where the preserved winding gear and restored features give little hint that it was once the scene of an underground tragedy. Narrow belts of woodland now shield disturbed ground of other lead miners’ efforts.

This is a walk for any time of the year, but the countryside is probably at its best in summer, especially on a day when it is not too hazy and you can pick out the features on the

furthest horizon.

Before setting off from Monyash take a little stroll around the village to find its many interesting features. Like its counterpart, Sheldon, it was once home to generations of lead miners and their families who toiled beneath the ground, often for meagre reward, for the industry was never highly profitable.

Being built on the limestone uplands meant the village had to deal with the problem of little or no easy access to water. As a result ponds, or meres as they were known, were built around the outskirts of the village; only one remains now, a pleasant duck pond just off the road to Parsley Hay.

Country Images Special Edition 115

A WALK BETWEEN

MONYASH AND SHELDON 1

From the village green, turn right beyond the Old Smithy Tea Room and walk along Chapel Street, then downhill to a road junction.

2

Turn right at the junction for a couple of yards or so, then climb the stile on your left to begin to walk gently uphill through a series of fields.

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Keeping a boundary wall on your right, cross the stiles in six field walls until you have a farm house to your right. Cross this last wall and begin to bear half right towards, but not into, a narrow belt of mature trees.

The line of trees marks the remains of a line of shallow pits where in days gone by miners delved for lead by following a series of narrow veins. The spoil from their labours was and still is, highly charged with traces of lead which could poison cattle should they graze on these heaps. The so-called disease they caught was known in the Peak District as ‘bellands’ and the trees were planted to keep cattle out and also act as a wind break.

4

Beyond the trees a stone stile in the right angle between two field walls marks the start of a straight stretch of path with a wall on either side.

Cross a further five stiles until you reach the Bakewell to Chelmorton road.

On your right as you cross the third stile look out for a restored dew pond and a small enclosure. This pond would originally have been dug by itinerant labourers by making a shallow hole lined with clay then finished with limestone to prevent cattle from sinking. The pond relied on rainwater which couldn’t escape through the semiwaterproof clay.

Also look out for the many different meadow

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flowers in bloom along the sheltered footpath. cross the road and go 5 Diagonally down an unsurfaced walled lane with

wide grassy verges (known locally as Wheal Lane). At the bottom of the dip, turn right through a bridle gate and walk down a narrow dale known as Deep Dale.

The turf is kept short by flocks of sheep nibbling the herbs and grasses, but they don’t stop the multitudes of semi-alpine flowers from flourishing all along the sides of the dale in their season. This is a well known area for different varieties of wild field orchids. out for a stone stile in the wall 6 Look on your right. Climb over it and

begin to ascend the steep dale side.

angle of climb eases at the first 7 The boundary wall. Cross this and then following a boundary wall on your left, cross six fields, changing over to the left through the last.

the road and follow it into 8 Join Sheldon village as far as the village inn on your right.

Sheldon’s miners mostly worked at Magpie Mine which you will pass directly. The graveyard attached to the tiny village chapel is the last resting place for many local miners, especially the Brocklehursts a well known lead mining family. is a choice of several paths 9 There behind and to the right of the village,

but all join close to the Magpie Mine.

There is one convenient to the pub and it leads across a series of small fields to the obvious landmark of the mine chimney.

The mine shaft is securely capped with a grill set in concrete, so it is safe to

explore the surrounding area, in particular

the restored mining artefacts such as the horse-powered winding gin or the circular explosives store whose design allowed any accidental blast to go safely upwards through a deliberately weak roof.

In 1833 three miners working in an adjacent mine called Red Soil were asphyxiated when Magpie Miners tried to smoke them out of what they considered to be their property.

10

With the mine cottage to your front and the winding gear behind, turn right and walk over rough ground to a stile. Cross this and bear half left, downhill across three fields to reach the road.

follow it uphill then go to the left at a junction at the top of the rise.

Continue along the road for a little over 100 yards and look out for a footpath sign on your left. into a field and follow its 12 Cross boundary wall as far as a belt of

trees masking old mine working.

of the trees bear slightly right to 13 Out follow a wall to your right along three fields.

the third wall, swing slightly 14 Crossing right away from the boundary and aim for another wall to your front.

Cross this and into two narrow fields, then go half right and then left as you cross two more fields.

care to look out for cars Reaching the road, turn right to 11 Taking travelling rather fast on this upland 15 follow it into a dip, and bear left road, turn right along the road and

uphill back into Monyash.

5.5

MILES

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Country Images Special Edition 117

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