Another kind of lonely countryside is the moorland around the Derwent Dams, those engineering marvels of man-made lakes surrounded by heathery hills and indigenous woodland. The stone buildings of the dams have a monumental quality and look as permanent as the hills themselves. This is the home ground of the Woodland Whiteface sheep, an ancient breed that was nearly extinct a few years ago until revived interest in rare breeds ensured its survival.
The start of the Pennine Way is at Edale and so popular has this walk become that the paths have grown wider and wider, and the heather and other vegetation is receding under the thousands of feet that pound it every year. Ill-prepared hikers can get a fright when the weather changes without warning, soaking them in rain and enveloping them in mist, with visibility down to the end of your nose. The Way crosses the well-named Bleaklow and Black Ashop Moor, as well as Kinder Scout, 2,088 feet above sea level, where the Mass Trespass of 1932 created famous (and often quoted) publicity for the ramblers, when six of their number were arrested for ‘riotous assembly’. Kinder Scout is the highest point of this inhospitable but fascinating country of grouse moors and hill sheep, where shepherds and their collies rule, and where the high road of the Snake Pass is the first to be closed by snow every winter.
If the hills are remarkable, so are the rivers. In 1817, Lord Byron wrote to the Irish poet Thomas Moore, ‘Was you ever in Dovedale? I can assure you there are things in Derbyshire as noble as Greece or Switzerland.’ Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton spent most of their lives in happy contemplation of the Dove, ‘the finest river that I ever saw, and the fullest of fish’, wrote Walton. Another crystal-clear trout stream is the Wye, which rises near Buxton and runs through Miller’s Dale, Ashford-in-the-Water and Bakewell, underneath Haddon Hall to join the Derwent at Rowsley. The most exciting stretch of the Wye is Monsal Dale, where the tall railway viaduct links the hills. The viaduct is a prime example of the changes in fashion in what is admired and what is denigrated. John Ruskin was infuriated when it was built in 1863 and by what he considered the ruination of the dale, just so that ‘every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour and every fool at Bakewell in Buxton’. Now it is revered as a triumph of engineering and for its own regular beauty.
The very names of the villages invite a closer look: Parsley Hay, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Alsop-en-le-Dale, Dove Holes, Peak Forest, Monyash, Foolow, Edensor, Stoney Middleton, Hope, Fenny Bentley, Stanton-in-Peak, Thorpe Cloud, Wigley, Earl Sterndale; and the dales: Chee Dale, Miller’s Dale, Deep Dale, Monk’s Dale, Demon’s Dale, Cressbrook Dale, Lathkill Dale, Crackendale, Beresford Dale and many more.
There are caves, notably Poole’s Hole near Buxton and the Great Rutland Cavern under the Heights of Abraham at Matlock Bath, a restored seventeenth-century lead mine in working order. The wealth produced from lead mining was of great importance to the county and the Barmote Courts, where lead-mining disputes were settled, are still held at Wirksworth and other places. Carved tablets showing miners’ tools adorn the front of Wirksworth Moot Hall and the big brass dish used as a measure for lead ore since 1513 is preserved here.
The mineral unique to Derbyshire is Blue John, the yellow and blue fluorspar which for centuries has been made into urns, ornaments and even tabletops, as well as smaller objects such as knife handles and jewellery. It is thought to have got its name from the French bleu jaune. Blue John pieces are high fashion in antique shops and the prices are as steep as the descent into the Blue John mines, which you enter under the shadow of Peveril Castle at Castleton. The Peak Cavern (or Devil’s Arse) has the largest cave entrance in Britain. In the Speedwell Cavern you travel for half a mile in a boat on the underground canal, and Treak Cliff Cavern is remarkable for its stalactites and stalagmites. Small quantities of Blue John are still extracted.
There is silence and solitude in the uplands of the Peak District, where once the Blue John and lead mines were worked by families as true cottage industries, in contrast with the coal mines around Chesterfield and Clay Cross, and the iron and heavy industries of Staveley, Alfreton and adjacent towns, where the night was lit by flames from the chimneys of the works that carried on their noisy trade twenty-four hours a day. Good arable land runs alongside opencast coal works, reminding us that industry and farming have coexisted in the county since the Romans worked the lead mines.
In 1771, Sir Richard Arkwright set up the first successful water-powered cotton mill in Cromford. Today there is great interest in industrial archaeology and the Arkwright Society has preserved some of the mills for visitors to see. One of the most hauntingly beautiful mills is on the River Wye at Cressbrook, which you come upon unexpectedly in a secluded narrow dale. Another impressive one is at Calver on the Derwent. It was used as Colditz Castle in the 1970s BBC television series and was a realistic model for that grim edifice. The National Tramway Museum at Crich is fascinating, full of memories for grown-ups and of wonder for children.
Derbyshire is physically and psychologically divided into north and south round about Matlock, where the Midlands seem to end and the north begins. This was recognised soon after the war, when local government offices were moved from Derby to the old spa hotel buildings in Matlock, a much more convenient centre from which to administer the long, narrow county. At Matlock accents change and the scenery turns from productive corn land into harsher, higher grass country. You climb to a height of 1,000 feet before you reach Buxton in the north, where the 5th Duke of Devonshire and Carr of York built the glorious Crescent. Here the average mean temperature in July is 57.5° F – mean indeed! No wonder the inhabitants delighted in the warm mineral springs. Buxton and Matlock were important spas when such treatment was fashionable.
Alas, the baths are no more. I have an abiding memory of a happy afternoon in a peat bath at Buxton, a ‘perk’ of the mayoress, which I was at the time. It was the colour and consistency of a huge cowpat. I lay in it up to my neck, sweating happily, till ordered out by the attendant who then sprayed me with a jet of clean, cold water to remove the beneficial but clinging brown stuff. I never felt better or smoother-skinned in my life and I rue the passing of the baths.
The denizens of Derbyshire are not as restless as those in the south. Some years ago our local doctor did a survey of the village of Hartington to try to discover more about goitre, or Derbyshire Neck as it is called from the commonness of the disease in this neighbourhood. He found that 90 per cent of the people living in the village were born there, a statistic unlikely to be equalled farther south. Surnames like Wildgoose and Burdekin, which are not uncommon round here, never fail to surprise ‘foreigners’. In Derbyshire you don’t make tea, you ‘mash’ it. If someone says he’s ‘starved’, he means he’s cold, not hungry. I know several natives who say ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’. My daughter at a Pony Club camp on the outskirts of a remote Peakland village once heard the farmer threaten his erring son, ‘Eh John, if thee don’t shape theeself I’ll belt thee one.’ Some swear words have never had the meaning given to them farther south – at any rate, they sound different in a Derbyshire voice. When Andrew stood for Parliament, a friend came to Chesterfield from London to canvass. She asked the driver who met her at the station how Andrew was getting on. ‘They like ’im but they say booger ’is party’, was the answer. Andrew’s candidature was never successful but there is no better way of getting to know a town and its inhabitants than to be a candidate. I have a deep affection for the place and still have many friends there.
The dilapidated Victorian Market Hall in Chesterfield and the shops on Low Pavement nearly succumbed to being put in a giant bunker under the market place, which would of course have been the end of them. Luckily good sense prevailed and they were beautifully restored. The Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust, with which I was associated for many years, has had much success in saving small, desirable houses from the bulldozer. I hope that many of the stone barns that litter the Peak District may find a new role as night shelters for walkers. They are not the grand cathedral-l
ike barns of the south of England, being often no more than sturdy sheds, but they are an important part of the landscape and many are falling to bits since they are no longer used for agricultural purposes.
The Bronze Age recumbent stones of Arbor Low on a high, bleak site near Youlgreave are worth a visit. I suggested to my sister Pam, who was deaf, that we should go there in the winter when the weekly Dad’s Army television programme was at its most popular and she replied, ‘Oh, Arthur Lowe, I should so much like to meet him.’ Eyam is famous for its villagers’ cour ageous behaviour. In 1665 a bundle of cloth contaminated by the plague arrived from London. To prevent the infection from spreading, Eyam’s parson, the Reverend William Mompesson, persuaded the villagers not to leave. The deadly disease ravaged the small population but it was contained, and Mompesson and the villagers are honoured at an annual outdoor service held in the field where he preached while the disease was at its height.
Much of Derbyshire is Robin Hood country. Inn signs, plantations, a group of rocks near Elton and a big stone outcrop high up in the woods above the old park at Chatsworth carry his name. The legend is that Robin shot an arrow from this stony height, saying he would be buried where it fell. It reached Hathersage, eight miles away as the arrow flies, and although there is no sign of Robin Hood’s grave, Little John is indeed buried in the churchyard. His grave was opened in the nineteenth century and a 32-inch-long thigh bone was found, which must have belonged to a man at least seven feet tall.
The immense oaks in the Old Park at Chatsworth are the outliers of Sherwood Forest and some are said to be a thousand years old. The oldest are kept alive by one or two small leafy branches. Their great hulks have rotted and become strange shapes, hollow and full of holes. They support an infinite variety of insect and bird life, and the younger and healthier trees provide big crops of acorns for the deer. We plant twenty or thirty in this part of the park every year and the fallen trees are never removed. Bracken gives the necessary privacy for the calves and fawns of the red and fallow deer.
No one can pretend that Derbyshire is famous for its food, though two delicacies are made in the county: Bakewell Pudding, a strange confection of almond paste, jam and pastry, and excellent Stilton cheese, which is made in a factory at Hartington.
The Peak District National Park was initiated in 1951 to look after some of the finest landscapes and villages. It takes no notice of county boundaries and wanders through parts of Cheshire and Staffordshire, though its main acreage is in Derbyshire. Although only 38,000 people live within the Peak Park, a third of the population of England is reckoned to live within an hour’s drive of the Peak District. It is visited by millions of town dwellers from Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Stoke, and the tourist industry is a valuable asset. In the most picturesque parts of the county, the landowners, farmers, smallholders and dwellers are constantly reminded of their heritage by the media, and it is to be hoped that this powerful lobby remembers that the villages will become Disneyland for trippers if they do not also recognise the need for jobs. If the county is to thrive, the limestone quarries, the mines for barites and fluorspar, and allied industries with their furnaces and factories, must go on as they have done for hundreds of years.
Derbyshire has more than its fair share of beautiful country. It also has some remarkable houses open to the public. In the south there is Sudbury Hall, home of the Vernons, which now belongs to the National Trust. Its somewhat forbidding exterior does not prepare you for the beauty of the plasterwork inside, described by Pevsner as ‘luxuriant and breathtakingly skilful’. Near Derby are Kedleston Hall, Lord Curzon’s Adam palace, and Melbourne Hall, with its splendid formal garden. Not far from Bakewell is Haddon Hall, that most English and romantic of Elizabethan buildings, and east of Chesterfield stands Hardwick Hall, Bess of Hardwick’s surviving masterpiece, which never fails to astonish the visitor by the mysterious sweep of the staircase and the vast scale and beauty of the Presence Chamber and Long Gallery.
I leave home less and less often now but every time I return after a spell away, I am struck anew by this county’s beauty – something I will never take for granted.
February 1982
Lagopus Lagopus Scoticus and Its Lodgers
A delicacy unique to these islands is grouse. The grand restaurants in London, Paris and New York vie with each other to have the first and best birds on the menu for dinner on 12 August, the opening day of the grouse shooting season. Grouse moors are by their very nature high, wild and remote places. Such privacy is necessary for these elusive birds. No way of ‘farming’ or artificially rearing them has been devised. Grouse are mysterious even to the keepers who spend their lonely lives with them.
Like people, they are prone to disease. The biggest threat to these winged marvels is Trichostrongylus tenuis, or the Trichostrongyle worm, and attacks by these parasitic threadworms can be fatal. If they get the upper hand, the bird population can be wiped out and, instead of healthy broods, the moor is littered with skeletons. Shooting is a culling operation which prevents overpopulation, the cause of this and other diseases.
All ground-nesting birds, their eggs and chicks are at risk of being taken by foxes, weasels, stoats, rats and flying predators, including several species of hawks now protected by law. The weather at hatching time is crucial. A thunderstorm plus hail during the last two weeks of May can be catastrophic to the new chicks. They need warm weather to provide the minute insects on which they feed, until later when their diet consists of the tips of young heather, followed by the seed. The chicks grow at great speed, almost as quickly as broiler chicks turn into supermarket fare. By 12 August, the majority are only about twelve weeks old but even so they can fly like jets and are at their succulent best to eat.
I wonder if the people tucking into their dinners at the Connaught or the Ritz realise how many skilled professionals have made it possible for these birds to reach their tables. Gamekeepers; flankers with flags who guide the birds towards their fate; beaters who walk many miles through high heather and – worst of all – bracken, which on a wet day is no fun; gunsmiths from Spain to South Audley Street; cartridge manufacturers; the makers of Land Rovers and Argo Cats (machines on tracks that can go up the nearly perpendicular hills in Scotland); Mrs Barbour DBE and her coats; dog breeders and trainers; the ‘guns’ – the eight or so men who stand in the line of butts, on whose shooting prowess ‘the bag’ depends; pickers-up, the people whose dogs find the birds on the ground after the drive – all combine in a team effort, like an army manoeuvre, before a single bird is shot.
For all sorts of reasons, the uncertainty of the number that will fly over the butts is part of the charm of grouse shooting. Nothing can be guaranteed, least of all the weather. It is a question of First Shoot Your Grouse – not easy in a gale, with rain pelting into your face, hands numb with cold in spite of August on the calendar, or when it’s so hot you can’t bear to touch the metal on the Land Rover and the dogs drink enough water to float a ship. However, on a perfect day – when there’s a breeze and sunny intervals, when the heather is full out and the pollen rising where the dogs hunt for fallen birds, when there’s a clear view across the purple heights to the greener ground below – it is an earthly heaven. Or sometimes at Bolton Abbey, it can be raining hard on the tops and you suddenly catch a glimpse of the silver snake of the River Wharfe in its sunlit carved green valley and it is like a vision of the Promised Land.
Grouse fly high, they fly low (like winged rabbits), they swoop, curve and jink, straight or twisting, singly, in pairs, or in packs of hundreds. They seem to be coming towards you and at the last moment they turn and cross the line three or four butts away. As you watch, disappointed, another bird comes at an impossible angle. You see it too late and a second chance is gone. A strong wind behind the birds increases their speed to a fly past; a wind against them and, hovering in the air almost stationary, they look easy but are as tricky as can be.
Getting the shot bir
ds from the butts on the high ground of the Yorkshire or Perthshire moors to a road and thence to a motorway or an airport is, in itself, a challenge. When everything goes right and the birds arrive in the kitchens, they still have to be plucked, drawn and cooked before anyone who can afford it can eat them. The point of this saga is not just that grouse shooting is the most exciting and the most testing of sports but it also produces a harvest of valuable food.
Should you still be curious about these birds, I must refer you to a book which ought to have a place in every library, The Grouse in Health and Disease, Lord Lovat (ed.), 1911. With its accompanying appendix it weighs 7lb 7oz and is profusely illustrated with disgusting pictures of parasites, vastly enlarged ticks and the other lodgers that enjoy living a life of luxury in or on grouse. Perhaps the diners in London and Paris are aware of this but I would love to know if, poised with knife and fork, they have any idea that the expensive luxury they are about to eat can carry up to 10,000 worms, not to mention other parasites. The squeamish will be glad to hear that the worms are happy to live in the gut and so they’ve gone before the grouse reach the Sèvres plates.
Perhaps it is better not to know but just to enjoy the worms’ host with no questions asked, and salute the dedication and skill of the keepers and the rest thanks to whom these epicurean treats have landed on your table.
Writing A Book
Odd things happen when you write a book. The prospective publishers make out a contract – written in double Dutch of course, to confuse – couched in lawyers’ language of ‘The First Party’, ‘The Second Party’, Marx Brothers’ style. And no Sanity Clause. Suddenly the book turns into ‘The Work’, as in ‘hereinafter termed the Work’. That’s the first sensible thing they say. Work it jolly well is. (Just as labour is a brilliant description of having a baby – except that it ought to be called hard labour.)
All in One Basket Page 16
