Getting a decent picture of the Earl of Derbys motte and Bailey castle is proving difficult- this is the result of the second attempt via Sheen!
It was built to protect, it is thought, the salt route from Cheshire into Derbyshire and so that the earl could levy taxes as the pack ponies carrying the salt entered the manor of Hartington. It also meant that any boundary disputes with the neighbours could be dealt with. Today though the place was deserted and I’m using an app on my phone to see if I can become more efficient at posting!
So much for posting every week – once again it’s been something of a summer! However, I’ve submitted the Dark History of Colchester to Amberley Press; discovered that collecting postcards is called deltiology; and nearly completed a Dark History of the Peak District. I’m collating images at the moment. And this is what led to today’s topic – a short round trip to gather photographs. And for those of you of a delicate disposition you may wish to turn away now.
The Magpie Mine near Sheldon first began mining for lead in 1740. Today it defines itself as the best preserved 19th century lead mine in the country. However, what its really famous for is the deaths of 1833. Rival groups of miners followed the Great Redsoil Vein of lead ore and rather unfortunately came to blows over who held the rights to it. Each group lit fires underground to force their rivals out. Three miners from the Maypitt Mine suffocated underground.
In all twenty-four Magpie Miners were arrested but when the case came before the judge at Derby it was decided that the Maypitt Miners should not have gone below ground in the circumstances nor did any one miner admit to having lit the fatal fire. Locally the legend of the ‘widows’ curse’ suggests that justice was served by other means.
The Magpie Mine’s Cornish engine house dates to 1869 – it was built at a time when the main shaft was deepened to 208 metres.
From there it was a hop and a skip to Ashford in the Water where you would have thought I’d have photographed the sheep wash bridge in the sunshine. I didn’t – I had a very lovely breakfast at the Ashford Arms before journeying via Monsal Head to the northern end of Cressbrook Dale and Peter’s Stone – or Gibbet Rock. In 1815 the toll house keeper at nearby Wardlow Mires was killed for her red leather shoes. Her murderer, Anthony Lingard from Tideswell was found guilty of the crime and executed at Derby. His body was transported back to the Peak District and suspended in the gibbet at Peter’s Stone as a warning to others – apparently it was the last gibbeting in Derbyshire. The view is rather cheerier these days.
From there it was a short journey to Tideswell, a quick look at the church and a hunt for the house of correction on Commercial Street – sadly it wasn’t very photographic because of the number of cars parked out front but I did have a look in the wool shop! Inevitably as we began the leg of the journey back to Buxton we paused at Litton Mill where poor apprentices died in their droves. Robert Blincoe, who was sent there from the St Pancras Workhouse, recounted his experiences and became the inspiration for Charles Dickens when he wrote Oliver Twist. Blincoe was initially apprenticed to a cotton mill in Nottinghamshire – without any payment until he reached adulthood – when the mill closed in 1802, Blincoe was sent to Litton. He detailed the horrors of a fourteen hour working day, savage beatings, starvation and abuse. Children who died at the mill were buried at Tideswell and Taddington.
From there it was on to Buxton and a nice cup of coffee in the Poole’s Cavern cafe. I had hoped to find some old postcards of the Peak District in town but there was no luck. It’s perhaps not surprising as deltiology is the third most popular hobby in the country after stamp and coin collecting.
Now I’m conscious that if I was currently receiving a mark for the frequency of my posts I’d receive something like ‘could do better.’ Fingers crossed!
It was said that the coming of the London and North Western Railway in 1863 from Stockport to Buxton was impacted by a supernatural skull, known as Dicky, when during the building work a railway embankment near Tunstead Farm when the line crossed the Coombs valley to Chapel-en-le-Frith slipped and the foundations of a bridge sank on several occasions.  Eventually the company had to relocate the bridge.  Local writers blamed Dicky for the expense and embellished the story with details of buried tools rather than consider that geology might have had its part to play.
The skull and the beleaguered inhabitants of Tunstead Farm was one of the most famous of the Peak District’s folk tales. In 1809, when John Hutchinson’s tour through the High Peak of Derbyshire was first published. Hutchinson met the owner of the farmhouse, Adam Fox, who claimed that the skull had been a feature of the property for the previous 200 years. There are several stories about the skull that used to be found at Tunstead Farm, near Chapel-en-le-Frith before its removal during the twentieth century to St James’ Church, Taxal, including the version that Ned Dixon was murdered by his cousin when he returned home after lengthy service as a soldier in Europe during the sixteenth century.  Dixon’s murderous cousin was troubled by the appearance of the skull which remained at the farm despite attempts to remove it.  By 1895, another story had sprouted: the skull belonged to a woman who was killed by her own sister during a quarrel over a man they both loved. Â
In reality, how the farm came to be home to the skull is a matter for conjecture.  William Bunting, a historian writing in 1940, claimed that it was an archaeological find dating from the Iron Age.
Railway owners who developed lines and opened stations inside the Peak District discovered that passenger traffic was larger than they anticipated. By the 1840s it accounted for two thirds of their revenue. The Midland Railway opened at station at Buxton on 1 June 1863 from Derby while the London and North Western Railway opened its own, identical, station a fortnight later. Affordable travel drew day trippers from the middle and working classes who lived in the industrial towns that surrounded the Peak District. The new arrivals wanted more than hills and dry-stone walls. Dicky’s skull became part of the Peak District’s lore offering entertainment that appealed to the visitors and a method of boosting the local economy. It was even possible to buy postcards featuring the farm and the skull.
Inevitably, Dicky is not the UK’s only haunted skull. There are several purportedly screaming skulls. At Burton Agnes, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Anne Griffiths was attacked and died soon afterwards having extracted a promise that her head would remain in the hall. Unsurprisingly her family did not comply with the request but soon wished that they had. To avoid continued disturbance Anne’s head was buried somewhere in the walls of the newly built house.
While history relies on recorded evidence – folk lore fills the gaps and there’s nothing like a spot of embellishment to improve a story in its telling!
I’ve settled down to read The Guide Stoops of Derbyshire by Howard Smith. Essentially prior to the establishment of Turnpike Roads travellers and pack ponies travelled by a network of roads and tracks without much in the way of sign posts – making longer journeys something of a dangerous activity – consider Celia Fiennes local guide who became lost in the Peak District at the end of the seventeenth century.
Derbyshire’s administrators – the local JPs- set about improving matters with the extension in the number of guide stones between 1717 and 1734, although the Hope Cross on the Roman road dates from 1737 and is probably a replacement of a medieval way marker. They were responding – somewhat late in the day to an act of Parliament dating from 1709 which required all parishes to set up way markers. The Peak District’s stoop stones catered for the more isolated routes. North Yorkshire’s justices had issued the same demands in 1711 while the West Riding’s guide stoops were expanded in 1700 in response to an earlier act of Parliament dating to 1697. In Yorkshire stoop stones are also known as hand stones – presumably because of the pointing hands that are sometimes carved on them.
However the arrival of turnpike roads changed matters quite considerably in terms of travelling by road and the marking of roads. In 1773 a Turnpike Act made fingerposts obligatory.
And finally, here is my favourite fact of the day – on page 14 of Howard’s work. A 3-ton waggon needed 8 horses to pull it. The same amount carried on the backs of the animals required 30 horses making the waggon a much more economical way of carrying heavy goods.
Sheen is on the boundary between Staffordshire and Derbyshire within the Peak District. In 1327, when Edward II had been deposed and Isabella of France and her lover – Roger Mortimer- were acting as regents for Edward III, 8 people were assessed for tax in the village which continued to expand across the centuries.
In 1666, 33 people paid hearth tax. This was a tax granted by Parliament to Charles II in 1662 to fund his household. Householders were required to pay 1 shilling per year for each hearth, stove or fireplace in their property – so basically it was a wealth tax. The more fireplaces you had, the bigger your home was and thus the more you were required to pay.
The population reached 458 by 1871 but began to decline after that. It was during the 1850s that the church was rebuilt and a new house provided for the vicar as well as a school and a reading room.
The manor of Sheen originally belonged to Wulfric Spot, an Anglo Saxon noble who lived during the reign of Æthelred the Unready. He was a patron of Burton Abbey dedicated to St Modwen. In about 1003 he granted land at Sheen to the abbey but by 1086 the manor lay in the hands of William the Conqueror. However, the conqueror and the papacy confirmed Burton Abbey’s ownership of the chapel at Sheen and granted them the tithes accruing from it. At that time the chapel was described as being dependent upon the church at Ilam.
In 1529, with the Reformation Parliament settling in to make the break with Rome so that Henry VIII could divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, the abbey leased the chapel along with its glebe (the plot of land belonging to the church), the tithes and offerings to the curate of Sheen -Henry Longworth and his brother Thomas for their lives. In 1536, Henry was granted a 30 year lease on the church and the responsibility for providing a priest. Evidently the monks at Burton were anxious to ensure that their property remained, if possible, out of the hands of the Crown. it seems that Henry left money for the building of the church tower when he died in 1541.
However, the Crown was not to be thwarted. In 1546 Henry VIII granted Burton Abbey’s possessions – together with the chapel at Sheen to Sir William Paget who began his political career as the MP for Lichfield in 1529. By the time of the grant he was one of Henry’s privy councillors. In his turn Paget leased the chapel to Ralph Crane of Middleton – and the chapel ceased to be part of Ilam’s parish. Crane’s family inherited the right to appoint the curate but in 1743, as part of Queen Anne’s Bounty, the curacy became a perpetual curacy.
Queen Anne’s Bounty was a fund established in 1704 to improve the incomes of poor clerics in the Church of England – it effectively returned church taxes to Sheen so that the curate’s salary could be improved. The idea was that the Bounty would make donations made by local landowners
The current church at Sheen dates from 1852 when it was rebuilt by A.J.B. Hope in the style of the original 14th century church. The tower was buttressed and raised. Instead of a spire it was covered with a copper cap. Locally it is believed that the four gargoyles at the bottom of the tower (who appear to retain their interest in water if the watering cans and buckets are anything to go by!) were destined to sit atop another storey but that the architect feared the foundations weren’t strong enough – it’s certainly the reason why the projected spire was abandoned. Porteous’ book, entitled Peakland, written in 1954 and the Historic England website state that they belong to the earlier medieval church that stood upon the same site.
A P Baggs, M F Cleverdon, D A Johnson, N J Tringham, ‘Sheen’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 7, Leek and the Moorlands, ed. C R J Currie, M W Greenslade (London, 1996), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol7/pp239-250 [accessed 23 May 2026].
There’re a variety of reasons why villages and settlements might have been deserted in the past. The obvious reason relates to the Black Death of 1348. Other reasons include landlords deciding to use an area for a new purpose. For instance, at Nether Haddon in the Peak District, the settlement was moved so that a new deer park could be created, Other settlements were relocated or abandoned due to an increase in wool production, enclosure and even the end of the monasteries which saw former monastic land end up in the hands of private landowners.
Climate change has its own story to tell – and at places like Hungry Bentley – also in Derbyshire which can’t have been particularly prosperous in the first place given its name – a couple of bad years would be enough to see a village deserted. Of course, living close to the coast could bring its own problems. Dunwich was once a thriving port but now its a ruin thanks to storms and coastal erosion.
In all there are about 3,000 deserted or vanished settlements in England – from across the centuries. The number of deserted medieval settlements in 1968 stood at 2,263 which was updated in 1977. Derbyshire had gained five lost settlements by that time rising from 33 to 37; the West Riding held steady at 75 settlements while Nottinghamshire had actually lost a settlement dropping from 67 to 66. The county with the biggest number of lost settlements is the North Riding of Yorkshire with 176 missing settlements. The University of Hull maintains a database of more than 2,200 sites.
Once upon a time Conksbury, which is on private property and not accessible, was part of the royal manor of Bakewell which William the Conqueror granted to William Peverel. He in turn granted land near Conksbury to Lenton Priory which he founded in Nottinghamshire while Conksbury was later given to St Mary de Pratis Abbey, Leicester by William Avenal – where it remained until the dissolution of the monasteries.
Henry VI hung on to it for a while as did the later Tudors but by 1610 it was part of the Cavendish family land holdings and as such remains part of the Devonshire estate. Magna Britannia states that Meadow Place Grange was given to Sir William Cavendish in 1552. The packhorse bridge at Conksbury was rebuilt in the 18th century to carry traffic and there were tolls for its upkeep from 1758 onwards.
I’m not sure what happened to December – other than the usual! And now having started physio on my shoulder I’m back at the keyboard which is probably just as well, because as ever in January I’m running behind.
Currently this year I have a talk in February in Nottingham at Waterstones on the evening of Thursday 26th February on the subject of Nottinghamshire. If you’re interested please follow the link to the Waterstones page.
Hopefully by the end of today I will have my first Zoom class for 2026 set up. It’s going to be on the subject of remarkable women of the Seventeenth Century – Lady Anne Clifford, Christina Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Mary Vere and her daughters, Aphra Benn, Brilliana Harley, Lady Jane Cavendish, Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort are among the women that spring to mind as well as Lady Ann Middleton from York and Mary Ward who became a Poor Clare. I will also be covering Lucy Hutchinson who wrote an account of her husband’s life and, less well known, Alice Thornton a northern diarist. In fact there are rather a lot of remarkable seventeenth century women when I come to think about it, I just need to martial the dates and organise them into some kind of order.
After the Romans departed from Britain’s shores the towns and roads that they established began to decay. Even so, the roads continued to be used as did earlier prehistoric trackways. A road running between Buxton and Wirksworth, known as The Street, was still being used in the eighteenth century and lets not forget that King Alfred used Watling Street to mark the boundary between his own realm and Danelaw. The addition of the name ‘Gate’ to any road was originally the Norse ‘gata’ meaning road while street, meaning a paved road, originated from Latin but which was adopted by Anglo-Saxon road users.
It wasn’t until 1285 that the Statute of Winchester required individual manors to maintain highways that passed across them. It also required tracks and bridleways to be maintained. At Norbury, Sir Henry FitzHerbert was required to obtain a licence in 1305 to divert the old road which rather inconveniently passed through the courtyard of his house.
More people began to travel as markets were established and monastic houses founded. The Earl’s Way, heading east, from Leek was established by the Norman earls of Chester using some preexisting tracks. In addition to the earl using the route to travel to various parts of his estates in meant that his tax gatherers could also access the area more easily. Other routes from Leek to Macclesfield permitted monks to send wool towards Chester for export.
Long distance packhorse routes including Portway and Doctor’s Gate near Glossop carried goods from Manchester to Nottingham. It is thought that some of the way originated during the Bronze Age. Pack horse routes, often in the form of hollow ways, caused by the erosion of countless feet, carried salt, wool, lead and any other merchandise that required transport. Hartington which had its own market from 1203 onwards was at the hub of a number of pack horse routes including a route passing Minninglow in the direction of Wirksworth.
One of the paths running eastwards is called Gallowlow Lane. The low refers to a Bronze Age bowl barrow, long since robbed out. Its name is suggestive of a place of execution but there’s no extant evidence for a gallows there other than the name and its position in a prominent place in the landscape. More cheerily there’s also a Jaggers Gate heading from Buxton in the direction of Macclesfield. A jagger was another name for a carrier or packhorse man while a jag was the load that a mule carried. In Derbyshire the term began as a name for the packhorse trains that carried lead ore. Meanwhile, Doctor’s Gate was named after Dr John Talbot who is recorded as improving a section of the old road during the late fifteenth century. Black Harry Gate is an eighteenth century addition to the names of Derbyshire’s roads. He was a highwayman – which possibly explains why there are so many references to gallows and gibbets scattered across the area. Daniel Defoe would call the region a ‘howling wilderness’ when he visited, so it’s safe to assume that it wasn’t necessarily always particularly law abiding.
There are also coffin roads that enabled isolated communities to carry the coffins of their loved ones to the nearest church. The best known one runs from Edale to Castleton. Hollins Cross marked the point where funeral parties might stop for a rest and to offer prayers. The Peak District has nowhere near as many of this kind of path as Yorkshire and Cumbria.
Dodd, A.E. and Dodd, E.M. Peakland Roads and Trackways
I’ve written about the Augustinians of Dunstable before but I’m trying to decide whether I want to keep Medieval Dunstable (edited by Yates, Jean ) or not. It was one of five houses founded by King Henry I. By the time he died there were nearly two hundred Augustinian monastic houses in England which just goes to show how keen his nobility were to get into his good books. Apparently The Augustinians were not an enclosed order. The canons were all ordained priests who chose to live as a monastic community; they served the neighbourhoods where they lived as priests and offered hospitality. And that’s one of the reasons why Dunstable ended up with lands in Derbyshire. Situated on Watling Street, it was one of the busiest medieval roads in the kingdom but unlike the hotel chain which advertises a good night’s sleep the canons were unable to charge for the food and lodgings they offered. Instead, they were given gifts by grateful travellers.
Much of the monastic land was in the Dunstable environs as were the churches to which the canons held the advowson – or the right to appoint the priest. They also held land and churches in Buckinghamshire and, this is where I become interested, Derbyshire. Bradbourne Manor which was part of the Honour of Tutbury lay in the hands of the Cauceis family. Sir Godfrey de Cauceis granted the chapels at Ballidon, Brassington, Tissington and Atlow to the canons as well as the tithes at Aldwark and Lee Hall. (Yates, Jean, (Ed.), ‘Churches and Lands: Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire & Oxfordshire’, in Medieval Dunstable, p.231.)
Unfortunately Godfrey died the following year and although the gift was confirmed, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Coventry kept episcopal and parish rights for himself. With so many fingers in the pie it is perhaps not surprising that the prior at Dunstable took matters further. In 1215 the case went to Rome and three judges were appointed to take a closer look at the Peak District churches. The rector at Bradbourne, Robert, was the son of the previous incumbent and yes, Henry the vicar at Ballidon was also the progeny of the previous cleric. Both men were described as being incontinent – which has nothing to do with the modern meaning and more to do with the keeping of mistresses. I suppose that it’s only fair that William who was the chaplain at Tissington kept moth mistresses and hunting dogs. As a result of these discoveries, which all three men denied, the canons at Dunstable were allowed to appoint new vicars.
And just when it seems you’ve got a handle on these things in 1230, Pope Gregory extracted a tenth tax on the income from Dunstable’s Peak District churches. In 1242 the canons required a new charter for the church at Bradbourne because the old one was nibbled by mice. In the decades that followed the canons made an annual visit to the Peak District to inspect the books – and possibly to enjoy the countryside. Not that it was always plain sailing. Sheep, as any hill farmer will tell you, are quite keen on finding innovative ways to die and there were several years when disease took its toll but in general the wool trade was a profitable one at this time.
And it turns out that the canons held church rights along Watling Street while at Pattishall, the lord of the manor came to an agreement with the prior for him to stay three times a year depending on the number of horses he had with him (Yates, p.240.). The Augustinians already owned land in Northamptonshire – think of it as joining the dots. And there was the Augustinian Priory at Repton, virtually on the doorstep.
Dunstable’s ownership of various Peak District lands and churches came to an end in 1540 with its dissolution. However, Medieval Dunstable is going back to its place on the bookshelf – the section about Derbyshire is small but extremely useful and I have been reminded that I need to retake photos of the various churches that Dunstable held but possibly not on a day when the rain is coming in horizontally.
