A Brief Look Around Markeaton, Mackworth & Kedleston
Some of Derbyshire’s finest and most sequestered countryside may be found west of Derby itself, although it is countryside well removed from ‘classic’ Derbyshire: the spectacular sequences of White and Dark Peak. West of Derby is gently undulating arable country, scattered with miniscule villages, some shrunk, some beginning to expand again, interspersed with country houses, delightful churches and the sites of other such settlements, long deserted, like Meynell Langley and Barton Blount. MARKEATON As such, the area is impossible to encapsulate in a single visit; the winding lanes, their erratic courses determined by the ancient boundaries of pre-existing land holdings, would always preclude so adventurous an enterprise. Instead, we proposed a taster, one that would take the voyager never very far from the City of Derby, yet still experience something of that ambience. We decided to start from the parkland which formerly surrounded Markeaton Hall, thoughtlessly demolished in 1964. Mercifully, a former owner, Mrs. Mundy, donated much of the park (along with the house) and the Council bought more (see Country Images for March and April 2012). We drove past the re-positioned hall gates, now restored and facing the Markeaton Roundabout on the Ashbourne Road. They look splendid, but they are wasted in such a position. In return for parking up, we were relieved of a certain amount of money for the privilege, so be warned! The parkland is today just over 200 acres and was landscaped around 1760 by William Emes, who was a prominent locally based follower of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown who specialised in lakes, although that at Markeaton was widened to allow boating by the Council in 1932. For twenty glorious years, the park was embellished by a miniature railway, mainly steam operated, closed by the Council in 2014, who refused to maintain to a decent standard the buildings leased by the railway’s proprietors, thus allowing repeated entry to vandals. It is much missed. We began at the pet cemetery at the SW part of the park, then moved via the surviving buildings to admire the surviving plinth of the early Tudor hall, incorporated by Joseph Pickford when he rebuilt the stables as a magnificent two-courtyard hunting stables, buildings with a rich heritage, subsequently diminished when demolished. What is left is the orangery (the roof much altered) and a single courtyard behind, the latter peopled by craft retail outlets which, once life gets back to normal, are always worth a visit. From thence proceed westward out of the park, past the west lodge, in which one 18th century gate pier is half-embedded and indeed, can be seen from within the upstairs room! Here one is in what remains of the village, moved here when the park was landscaped but embellished by two fine earlier farm houses, a tea shop and garden centre. It still retains the pleasant semi-somnolent appearance of the estate village it once was, and is one of the few remaining true pieces of rus in urbe remaining within the city. Markeaton and Mackworth were essentially lumped together in Domesday Book, and as you look west from Markeaton village, the spire of Mackworth church (founded by the Touchet family of Markeaton somewhat later than Domesday) can be seen. Indeed, the Roman Road from Little Chester to Chesterton (Staffs.) ran from here directly across the fields to the church which was built across its alignment. Its course is marked by the lane for a hundred yards, which then diverges left from the alignment, whilst it continues across a field, the agger (raised plinth) on which it lay and a hedgerow marking its course. We chose to retrieve the car, and drive along the Ashbourne Road (with the Markeaton parkland and the old Ashbourne road alignment on our right) to the traffic lights at Radbourne Lane, where we turned right down the lane to the church. Unfortunately, last December this beautiful edifice, listed grade one because of the rich collection of local carved alabaster within, was utterly gutted through the efforts of an arsonist, and now makes a sorry sight and is partly barricaded off. Yet hope is at hand, as it was well insured and Historic England have insisted on its re-instatement. The Roman road runs in front of the church’s south door. I know this because in 1981 I directed two Archaeological Society excavations to find and record it and the east part duly showed up clearly. Oddly, to the west of the berm of the churchyard, there was no sign of it at all! The earth for a metre down had been cleaned, probably by a flood, of all vestiges! To the SE of the chancel is the Mundy vault with its locally made but strangely pretty iron brattishing, and to the immediate west of the path to the south door is a substantial stone monument, the inscription upon which is to Sarah, infant daughter of William Emes, who lived at Bowbridge House a little west of the village on the main road. Yet a little further west of the poor, forlorn church, the alignment of the Roman Road converges with the village street here called Lower Road. A walk along it as far as Jarvey’s Lane, where a brick double pile early Georgian farmhouse makes a gratifying marker, is a complete delight. The village, never large, but which largely supplanted Markeaton from the mid-18th century, is still essentially an estate village, for the Mundy family’s heirs, the Clark-Maxwells continued to farm the estate despite the last Mrs. Mundy giving the house to the Borough. The handsome Victorian vicarage of 1877-78 (since the death of the much-admired Revd. Henry Dane, now privatised), the ornately decorated school, and several of the houses were designed by Robert Evans of Nottingham (1832-1911) who opened a Derby office with William Jolley on the back of extensive work for the Markeaton Estate. MACKWORTH One building clearly not by Evans, of course, is the shell of the stone gatehouse built four hundred years earlier, when part of
