Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Walking Above the Canal – Cromford

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Chatsworth to Haddon Hall

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Kedleston’s Glorious Parkland

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Winter Warmer Around the Longshaw Estate

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A walk around Ilam Hall

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Walking Above the Canal – Cromford

February 27, 2019 VickyP

The car park at the Cromford end of its namesake canal is a popular starting point for at least five walks to my reckoning. Most weekends and days in between, well-clad walkers will be congregating, busily pulling on their boots and at the same time, chatting to their friends. This walk starts, like all the […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Chatsworth to Haddon Hall

February 5, 2019 VickyP

The two great houses visited on this walk are within four miles of each other as the crow flies, but each has made a unique impression on the face of the Peak District. Chatsworth, ancestral home of the Dukes of Devonshire has developed following the fashions of house-building nobles. Additions have been made since its […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Kedleston’s Glorious Parkland

January 3, 2019 VickyP

It is hard to believe that the ever constant bustle of Derby’s traffic is barely a couple of miles away at its closest point. Kedleston’s park is an oasis of tranquility, with now naturalised groves and plantations, set around hundreds of acres of green-sward and lakes. All this overlooks winding ponds separated by tinkling waterfalls, […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Winter Warmer Around the Longshaw Estate

November 26, 2018 VickyP

I have to make an apology before embarking on the text for this walk. In July I acquired a new hip, this was after upwards of ten years trying to ignore an ever growing problem. Fortunately I had the sense to build up a stock-pile of walks, which kept Garry and Alistair happy at Images […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A walk around Ilam Hall

September 25, 2018 VickyP

Tucked away on a bend of the Manifold river, Ilam Hall village was built in the 1820s on the instructions of Jesse Watts-Russell. The original Victorian houses of the village echo the fairy-tale image of the hall, built at a time when skilled labour was cheap. It was also a time when tenants could be […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Around Winster

July 24, 2018 VickyP

Winster is a haphazard cluster of seventeenth and eighteenth- century houses linked by narrow hillside alleys or ginnels as they are known locally. They sit in a pattern which suited the lead miners and their families in the hey-day of this now extinguished Peak District industry. The walk follows paths once trodden by miners who, […]

Walks

Derbyshire Walk – Elvaston Castle

June 27, 2018 VickyP

This walk, around the parkland of Elvaston Castle, is one of my occasional excursions from some of Derbyshire’s grand houses. Unfortunately it could almost be described as from one of Maxwell Craven’s ‘Lost Houses’. Financial constraints on its present owners, Derbyshire County Council, make it impossible to fund the necessary £6.1 million needed to restore […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Foolow & Silly Dale

June 5, 2018 VickyP

There are no records of any simpleton, either in Foolow or Silly Dale; both names come from Anglo Saxon English and have entirely different meanings than in today’s language. Foolow means multi-coloured hill, possibly a reference to nearby Eyam Edge. Silly is Old English for pretty, an apt description of this little-known dale, especially in […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Tideswell, Miller’s Dale and Litton

May 1, 2018 VickyP

The history of the Peak District is writ large on this walk. Starting way back in time when volcanoes spewed out their lavas, the walk enters one of the loveliest dales in the White Peak, but it was where orphaned children were unable to enjoy its delights. Climbing out of the dale, the way is […]

Walks

Derbyshire Walk – Tissington

April 5, 2018 VickyP

I had visions of Michael Fish, the man whose forecast about there being no danger of hurricanes, went as his Scots forebears would have put it; ‘gone aft a’gley’. In my case it was a completely wrong interpretation of the forecast. According to a weather map in the Guardian a day or so before the […]