Category Archives: Peak District

Dicky’s Skull – when folk lore and tourism collide to make history.

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https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/taxal-st-james

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.  

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!

Burton Agnes, East Yorkshire

Guide Stoops and turnpikes – a couple of random facts.

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Ashover – Stone Guide Stoop by Neil Theasby, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

St Luke’s Church, Sheen and its gargoyles

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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].