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Walk Derbyshire – Ashover & Littlemoor via Ashover Rock

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Matlock to Bonsall

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Calton Lees, Chatsworth to Rowsley

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Alport to Middleton

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Pleasant Walk from Pilsley to Hassop

Walks

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Walk Between Monyash & Flagg

April 2, 2024 VickyP

If you were living in the Peak District countryside around a hundred years ago, the chances are that you would be following a dual working schedule. Part of your working day would be tending the needs of a dairy herd and maybe carrying out a little ploughing and growing feed crops for those valuable cattle. […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Shardlow’s Inland Port and Eighteenth Century Walk

February 6, 2024 Alistair Plant

When the eighteenth century Duke of Bridgewater’s fiancé gave him what we might today call the push, he decided that not only was he secretly pleased to be rid of her, but to be honest, he was also bored by London, which took up too much of her time through the London Society she frequented. […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Fernilee & The Goyt Valley

January 2, 2024 Alistair Plant

The South Manchester town of Stockport gets most of its water from two reservoirs filling the narrow upper reaches of the Goyt Valley near Buxton. It is hard to realise that this was a self-supporting estate with its own coal mines and small industrial estate where gun powder was made. Errwood Hall, the central building […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Walk From Pentrich to Crich & Back

November 1, 2023 Alistair Plant

At the forefront of the Pentrich Rising were Jeremiah Brandreth, a 31-year-old unemployed stocking knitter who had a wife and two children; Isaac Ludlam, a bankrupt farmer who owned a small quarry where he had built up a small supply of pikes; and William Turner, a stonemason and ex-soldier. From Pentrich this walk will take […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Along Lover’s Walk – Ilam

August 30, 2023 Alistair Plant

The popular village and National Trust property of Ilam and its hall, are based on a Saxon settlement, later expanded in Victorian times. In its early days it was where the early Celtic Christian missionary St Bertram baptised his flock, using a well on the slopes of Bunster Hill to the north of the village […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire Cromford Meadows & Black Rocks

July 25, 2023 Alistair Plant

Cromford owes its birth to Richard Arkwright, founder of the water-driven cotton spinning frame, one of the leading inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Harassed by home-based cotton spinners and weavers in his native Lancashire, in 1771 he opened his first mill, using the convenient power of the nearby River Derwent, close to the Crom Ford, […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – High Peak Trail Across Middleton Moor

June 30, 2023 Alistair Plant

When the civil engineer William Jessop and his associate Benjamin Outram finished building the Cromford Canal. While they were linking the expanding industries of the Derwent Valley to the Midlands, it was soon realised that if the canal was continued in a northerly direction, it would open the burgeoning new cotton industry to markets around […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Riber Via the Front Door

June 3, 2023 Alistair Plant

Standing at 850 feet above sea level on an isolated hilltop, Riber Castle, to give it its acknowledged title, has dominated Matlock’s eastern skyline ever since John Smedley built it in 1862. His idea was to make it the de-lux version of the spa hotels springing up around the town, venues of places offering accommodation […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – Exploring Shipley Country Park

May 2, 2023 Alistair Plant

In 1086 when Duke William of Normandy’s monks were compiling the Domesday Book in order to record the value or otherwise, of the conquerors’ ‘new country’, in listing the wealth of lands in the north Midlands, they recorded details of a section of countryside close to what is now called Ilkeston which was a private […]

Walks

Walk Derbyshire – A Walk Above Matlock

March 28, 2023 Alistair Plant

by Rambler I don’t think I have ever written about a walk where the instructions needed to mention street names, but as this walk involves the use of streets dating back to Matlock’s origins as a spa town, it will be helpful if I name the handful of them necessary, in order to reach the […]