Cromford Moor Mine and the legend of the Black Rocks

Assailed by hay fever, flying insects and stinging nettles, Gareth Icke is our guide for a walk in the hills above the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire/

With that setting, disused lead mines, white spoil heaps and unlikely-sounding local folklore, this video ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.

For more like it, subscribe to The Walk on YouTube.

A disused railway in Derbyshire is being turned into a canal

One of my favourite stretches of canal is the five miles from Cromford to Ambergate in Derbyshire's Derwent Valley. I first came across it in 1977, which was when our English teacher had wangled the funds to take his A level set on a field trip to D.H. Lawrence country and we camped beside the river at Whatstandwell.

At that time those five miles of canal were in navigable condition and the Cromford Canal Society ran popular horse-drawn trips along them. But round about 1990 the society broke up in the midst of a scandal whose details I cannot remember and the canal returned to desuetude.*

It has since been taken over by the trust that looks after Arkwright's Mill at Cromford,** and improvements are being made.

But when those five miles are fully restored, the Cromford Canal will still be cut off from the main inland waterways system. Because Ambergate is nearly 10 miles from Great Northern Basin, which marks the other end of the Cromford Canal.

Great Northern Basin is at Langley Mill in Derbyshire and is the start of the Erewash Canal, which is navigable all the way to the Trent at Long Eaton - I have visited the other end of it at Trent Lock there.*** A disused portion of the Nottingham Canal that joined the surviving stretch at Lenton in the city began there too - there were so many canals there because of the lucrative coal traffic.

A start at restoring the first mile or so of the Cromford Canal out of Great Northern Basin is being made. As this video explains, there are considerable challenges in this: part of the route has been lost to a road scheme and opencast mining.

You can support these Trekking Exploration videos via their Patreon page.

The solution is to dig a new route for the canal, making use of an old railway track. Importantly, the track has a bridge under the new road because trains were still running along it when the road opened.

This is great news, but there are still formidable obstacles to be overcome if the whole of the Cromford Canal is to be restored. Chief among them is the partially collapsed Butterley Tunnel.

If you are interested in this canal and the prospects for its restoration, there are a couple of posts on this blog with videos that may interest you:

• Walking the length of the Cromford Canal
• Uncovering the secrets of the Cromford Canal

* hem hem

** I've blogged about my proposal before. As the years go by, it looks more and more reasonable.

*** I like the picture at the top of that post so much that it's the wallpaper on my laptop.

Uncovering the secrets of the Cromford Canal

An enjoyable trip to the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire as Paul and Whitewick follow the abandoned Cromford Canal.

The canal once connected with the wider canal system at Great Northern Basin near Langley Mill, but Butterley Tunnel collapsed somewhere in the middle long ago, so full restoration is unlikely.

Oh, and "Erewash" has three syllables. Sounds so much better.

The Joy of Six 1075

Anne Applebaum meets the Belarusians resisting the threat of Russian imperialism by taking up arms in Ukraine.

"Last year, a child in North Wales was kidnapped while abductors held his foster mother at knifepoint. Wilfred Wong, an evangelical Christian and long-time activist behind the group Coalition Against Satanist Ritual Abuse, whose goal is “to increase public awareness and action regarding satanist ritual abuse,” was sentenced to 17 years in prison for his role in the abduction." Brandy Zadrozny says Satanic panic is making a comeback, fuelled by QAnon believers and Republican influencers,

Jane Chelliah on talking about female ageing.

"All of the players we spoke to reported that they received no support or aftercare from their clubs, which added to their difficulty transitioning away from the club." Thomas Ryan McGlinchey looks at the impact on youngsters of being released from professional clubs' football academies.

"Born in Edinburgh in 1934, Donald Seaton Cammell’s early years were shaped by his eccentric father's ... role as the biographer of Aleister Crowley, the diabolist who revelled in his reputation as ‘the most evil man in the universe’. In later years, Cammell Jr would talk about the time he sat upon the knee of 'The Great Beast’." Richard Luck reviews the life and career of the director of Performance.

Philip Wilkinson discovers some neglected Georgian shops bordering Cromford market place.

Boris Johnson joins my campaign to have Parliament moved to Arkwright's Mill in Cromford

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cromford Mills (@cromfordmills1771)

At last! A big-hitter has backed my campaign for the Palace of Westminster to be allowed to fall to ruin and Parliament to be sent to meet in Arkwright's Mill in Cromford.

As I once wrote of the palace:

Imagine how much more attractive it would be as a ruin alive with feral cats, buddleias and fragments of Gothic tracery.

Until now, I will admit, this campaign has gathered steam only slowly. But tonight all that changed.

Home from caring for my mother, I logged into Instagram and found this on the Cromford Mills account.

OK, it says it's Sir Richard Arkwright, but it's clearly our current prime minister. He's in Derbyshire and pacing out the dimensions of a new debating chamber within the mill.

Forward to victory!

A walk round Cromford 2

The second part of the walk saw me exploring the south of the village behind the Arkwright Houses before reaching, inevitably, Arkwright's Mill.

Now see part 1.

A walk round Cromford 1

We were in an English lesson in the lower sixth and the people taking Geography were off on yet another field trip. We may have advanced the observation that it was not fair.

Our English teacher Mr Haydon or Haden - given how good he was I am ashamed that I cannot be sure of his name - told us to leave it with him.

One of the books we were studying was The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence and. sure enough, he put together a trip to Lawrence Country.

We camped at Whatstandwell in the Derwent valley for a couple of nights and visited Cossall (the Cossethay of the novel) and Eastwood library, which housed a large collection of items connected with Lawrence.

Ever since, the Derwent valley has been special to me and I try to visit Cromford (one station to the north of Whatstandwell on the Matlock branch) every summer.

This is the first of a couple of posts featuring photos taken at Cromford last Augsut. It concentrates on the bridge over the Derwent, Willersley Castle and the part of the village called Scarthin, with its wonderful bookshop and repurposed chapels.

The Derwent Valley in snow and flood

From the Britain on Film site:

From the Big Freeze of 1963 to gales, landslides and, most memorably, the major flooding of December 1960 and November 1965 - local photographer Harry Gill was on the spot to capture these moments of extreme weather in Derbyshire. 

Motorists try to negotiate Crown Square in Matlock as waves of muddy water from the Derwent flow into the town. The streets seems eerily quiet as residents take to the largest vehicle available: a huge quarry lorry, to navigate the deluge.

The frozen water wheel was filmed in Cromford.

The Arkwright Houses, Cromford

North Street in Cromford contains the earliest planned industrial housing in the world.

Built by Richard Arkwright, the street's three-storey houses had sec[,d-floor workshops for framework knitting.

You can read more about them on the Historic England site.

The cricket ground at Cromford

You'll find Cromford's cricket ground in the meadows beside the Derwent with views of the hills beyond.

Inside St Mary's, Cromford

In Cromford last summer I found St Mary's church open because Excellent Women were at work inside. So I took some photographs.

The church's Listing on the Historic England site gives its history:

The church was begun in 1792 for Richard Arkwright's industrial complex and residence at Cromford, and was prominently sited next to the cotton mill and River Derwent. It was designed by Thomas Gardner (c1737-1804), architect and builder of Uttoxeter, who was also employed on the reconstruction of Arkwright's Willersley Castle. The wide proportions of the nave are characteristic of the period, and Gardner's church probably had a small chancel of the kind that had become deeply unfashionable by the 1850s. 

The church was substantially rebuilt in 1858 by H.I. Stevens (1806-73), architect of Derby who built many churches in the East Midlands. Stevens enlarged the chancel, remodelled windows and added the tower and west narthex. The ambitious scheme of wall paintings and stained glass was undertaken by Alfred Octavius Hemming (d 1907), who had previously worked for Clayton & Bell and had completed a similar extensive mural scheme at Folkestone, Kent. The scheme at Cromford was completed in 1897 on the centenary of the church.

The wall paintings were damaged by water over the years and underwent a serious restoration in 2002.

The Cromford and High Peak Railway in 1967

Opened in 1831, the Cromford and High Peak Railway linked the Cromford Canal at High Peak Wharf with the Peak Forest Canal at Whaley Bridge.

Remarkably, most of the the railway and its rope-hauled inclines survived until 1967. This video shows the line's locomotives taking the stock for an excursion train from Buxton.

The Palace of Westminster needs renewal in more ways than one

Catherine Slessor wrote in the Observer about the "fussy, frivolous neo-gothic wedding cake" that is the  Palace of Westminster.

While it undergoes a £4bn restoration, it will he housed in Richmond House on Whitehall. the building will be gutted so that a replica of the current Commons chamber can be fitted inside.

Which means that the oblong shape and the two sides of the house glaring at one another will be maintained.

As Slessor says:

 Doubtless MPs will find it comforting, a green leather umbilicus connecting them with the ailing mothership, but it does seem like another missed opportunity to experiment with alternative layouts and explore different ways of conducting debate. 

Both the devolved Scottish and Welsh parliaments have embraced the continental hemicycle without mishap, and the tone of their encounters seems more civilised for it.

Other nations have used the need to renew their parliament building as an opportunity for modernisation. But::

Hopelessly infatuated with a Victorian vision of itself, Britain seems set on the opposite course, committed to painstakingly licking Barry and Pugin’s decaying wedding cake back into shape.

The video above, from the University of Sheffield's Sir Bernard Crick Centre, makes much the same case.

My own solution of allowing the Palace of Westminster to fall into decay - "Imagine how much more attractive it would be as a ruin alive with feral cats, buddleias and fragments of Gothic tracery" - and having parliament meet at Arkwright's Mill in Cromford remains underexplored.

Arkwright's Mill, Cromford, in 1947

When cotton spinning ceased at Arkwright's Mill, Cromford, in the middle of the 19th century, the site was given over to a number of other industrial uses.

Among them was paint manufacture, a process whose toxic legacy continues to present a challenge to those restoring the buildings.

In this aerial photograph from 1947 you can see that the central courtyard is occupied by a clutter of more modern buildings. All these have now been cleared from the site.

Found art in Cromford

I like the random arrangements of objects you find in junk shops and antique shops.

Cromford has such establishments, both at Arkwright's Mill and in the village centre.

Five miles east of Shardlow: Trent Lock at Long Eaton

I liked Shardlow, where the Derwent and the Trent and Mersey Canal join the River Trent. So yesterday I visited Trent Lock, five miles to the east, where the Erewash Canal and the River Soar join it.

The walk down the canal from Long Eaton station deserves a post of its own, but Trent Lock was also more interesting and attractive than I expected.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station dominates the view from the other side of the river, and I once named the Trent Viaducts, which take the Midland main line across it, as one of my five favourite bridges. Thee is a weir beneath them that boats heading north avoid by using the artificial Cranfleet Cut.

Their are two pubs and a tearoom by the lock where the canal enters the Trent. The Erewash (pronounced as three syllables, please) was built to serve the area's coal mines, and one day I will go to Great Northern Basin where it ends. 

That is also where the Cromford Canal once began its journey to the obvious new venue for Parliament.

The mouth of the River Soar is the other side of the river from Trent Lock, but easily seen thanks to a helpful narrow boat.

Let's leave the last word to Auden and Isherwood in the Dog Beneath the Skin (though I think these lines were lifted by the former from a contemporary topographical writer):

As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out
of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.

Cromford waits impatiently for Parliament to be relocated there

Regular readers will remember my solution to the problem of the Palace of Westminster needing extensive, expensive restoration:

Just let the place gently fall into decay. Imagine how much more attractive it would be as a ruin alive with feral cats, buddleias and fragments of Gothic tracery.

They will also remember my alternative venue for Parliament: Arkwright's Mill in Cromford, Derbyshire.

I was there today and am pleased to report everything is in order.

The mill itself is now more of a visitor attraction - in fact it is an experience - and could surely accommodate a couple of debating chambers.

And you can take a boat along the Cromford Canal, which you have not been able to do since the 1980s, when what was once a vigorous restoration society fell apart.

Where the Trent and Mersey Canal and the Derwent join the Trent

Shardlow is not quite where the Trent and Mersey Canal meets the River Trent. The junction is about a mile east of the village.

The canal joins the river on the outside of a wide bend, The Derwent, which has journeyed from the Peak District through Cromford and Derby joins the Trent there too,

Just upstream, there is a bridge across the Trent,

St Mary, Cromford

There is something incongruous about this late 18th-century church, which stands among stone outcrops and beside the River Derwent.

It was originally planned as a chapel for Willersley Castle, the stately home Richard Arkwright had built but died before he could enjoy.

He now lies in the crypt beneath St Mary's.

The church will come into its own when my plan to move Parliament to Cromford comes to fruition.