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.
The current drought is having a striking effect in Derbyshire, where the village of Derwent is emerging as the waters of Ladybower Reservoir recede. This video from Trekking Exploration (like and subscribe) shows us what can be seen this week. There will be more to come if the drought continues.
Derwent was drowned by the reservoir, which was constructed between 1935 and 1943.
The spire of the village church was originally left standing above the water and people tried to swim out to it. This was deemed too dangerous, so the church was dynamited.
We see what remains of the church today in the video, and the photo below - which I've always found deeply sinister - shows the reservoir when the church could still be seen.
Another day out with Steve and friends for LeiceExplore, this time tracing the route of the Derby Canal, which was closed to navigation in 1964 having been unpassable for some time. There's a promise of more videos on this waterway to come.
I find the traces around Derby station particularly interesting, though I admit I've found that locomotive cab myself but failed to recognise the canal bridge next to it. And we should all mourn the loss of the level crossing of the Derwent.
The Derby and Sandiacre Canal Trust explains what was once to be found:
The Derby & Sandiacre Canal ran from the river Trent at Swarkestone and climbed through 3 locks to the Trent & Mersey Canal and Swarkestone Junction on the Trent & Mersey canal thence to Sandiacre on the Erewash canal, with a line to Little Eaton where it met a plateway.
There was also a branch to the river Derwent in the city centre, which enabled boats to reach the Silk Mill and the mills and foundries further up the river to Darley Abbey.
If you explore the trust's site you will also find their plans for restoring much of this route.
The Derbyshire village of Derwent was sacrificed to the construction of Ladybower Reservoir during the second world war. Its buildings had all been demolished by the autumn of 1943 and the site was underwater by the end of the following year.
There was something haunting about the way the church spire was left standing above the waters of the reservoir. The glory of reaching it proved too much of a temptation to swimmers. and it was dynamited at the end of 1947.
This video from Trekking Exploration - why not subscribe to their YouTube account? - was shot in the summer of 2022, when the reservoir was particularly low. But already the mud was waiting to trap careless walkers...
The Derbyshire villages of Derwent and Ashopton were demolished and then drowned when the Ladybower reservoir was constructed in 1944.
In dry summers their remains are revealed by the receding waters, and Martin Zero and friends went to see them last summer.
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:
* 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.
It's time for another trip to the valley of the wonderful Derbyshire Derwent with Trekking Exploration.
This time we go in search of the Bamford and Howden Railway, which was used in the construction of the Derwent and Howden dams between 1901 and 1916, and of Birchinlee, the abandoned village where the labourers lived.
If you want to go deeper, you can find some photographs of the railway in operation on Public Transport Experience. That site also has a photograph of a building in the nearby village of Hope that was taken there from Birchinlee.
You can support these Trekking Exploration videos via their Patreon page.
Extraordinary landscape and extraordinary engineering. The Rivelin Tunnel takes water from Ladybower Reservoir in the Derwent Valley and delivers it to the reservoirs on the River Rivelin that supply Sheffield.
This video crosses the hills in between to trace its route and on the way relates the history of its construction.
You can support these Trekking Exploration videos via their Patreon page.
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.
Eric Levitz says the choice before us on climate change is techno-optimism or barbarism.
"Not only is parkrun exactly the kind of health intervention that local government should be pulling out all the stops to support, but it is also a source of company and community to many people who have ended up socially adrift." Isabel Hardman asks why the post-lockdown revival of parkrun is being delayed.
"Ballard, who was no admirer of England’s 'green and pleasant land' and was quick to embrace the cool promise of modernity after the war, nevertheless found worrying portents in the high-rise tower blocks going up in cities in the United Kingdom and United States." Phyllis Richardson on J.G. Ballard, tower blocks and dystopian dread.
Oliver Wainwright travels to Derby and its new Museum of Making, housed in an old silk mill beside the River Derwent.
Kaitlyn Tiffany looks at the popularity of conspiracy theories about celebrity pregnancies.
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 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.
As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out
of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.
