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Guides Index> All About Derbyshire> This page |
| All About Derbyshire by Edward Bradbury, 1884 (2).* |
| Eighteenth and nineteenth century tour guides about Matlock Bath and Matlock |
Derbyshire Dales. Chapter X. IN THE ASHOVER VALLEY (part), pp. 118 - 120 |
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We might linger all day on this ridge watching the country below and around as the sun plays with the picture, now revealing, now concealing, until the eye is bewildered by the changing light, and the extent and profusion of the prospect. To-day our journey is to Matlock. It is not on the old dreary moorland road—the Chesterfield and Matlock turnpike—that our footsteps are directed. Our route is at the back of Ravensnest, climbing above the Overton Tors, and then by North and South Carolina, through the village of Tansley, by a deep and steep round, made pleasant by the confession of musical water-threads, into Matlock. For the information of the reader, following the footsteps of our careless little party, I may observe that the high road to below and around as the sun plays with the picture, now Matlock from Ashover is heavy and monotonous, relieved only by the stirring scenic interest of the view of the Matlock Valley seen from the ridge of the hill dipping into Matlock ; but diverse and beautiful, though somewhat rough, is the romantic route by Tansley. When we have heard of North Carolina, we are not at all surprised to hear of "New York House." It is a desolate cottage on the top of the hills. The world lies below. There is only the broad dome of ether above. Around, the moors. No poetry of filmy smoke adds comfort and colour to the lonely habitation. The windows are broken ; the doors falling to pieces ; the roof is in ruins. Bret Harte might tell a story of aching pathos from this cottage wreck. The story is simple and crude, as all pathetic stories are. Years ago a villager in Ashover Valley burst the bonds of those "Twin jailers of the daring heart Low birth and iron fortune," and sought out a new career in the New World. He made a competence, and lost it, and came back from New York poorer than he started. He settled down in his old age in this bleak house on a hill overlooking the Ashover Valley where he was born and spent his early days, and to where he had returned a gray recluse broken on the wheel. And thus living alone, his strange dwelling became known as "New York House." And thus he lived on the healthful country side in simple and honest ways after his wanderings, the rising and setting of the sun being his only record of existence. One day, as the hill-people passed the isolated house, there was no smoke arising from the chimney. They re-passed. There was no stir of life. When at last the latch was lifted the old man sat in his oaken chair asleep. He had taken a longer journey than he had gone in his adventurous youth, and embarked on a wider and more mysterious ocean than the Atlantic. Crossing a farm kept and managed by two maiden ladies, and passing an old house where a poacher lives when he is not "winnowing the buxom air" on the Derby treadwheel, behold! we are under the shadow of a ruined tower, lonely and lofty and standing four-square to the winds. It might be a Pictic watch-tower. Peradventure it was associated with the Roman occupation. There it stands on the high table-land, like a grim fortalice frowning over one of the widest stretches of country in the Midlands. But instead of being connected with the conquests of Cesær, it belongs to the genius of Bolton and Watt. It is the Overton Engine! Our American Doctor is disappointed. The tower is not even "early-English." Like the Philistine in Patience, it "might be early-English before it is too late!" Overton Engine! It belongs, however, to the Romance of Trade, and the Poetry of Peace. The engine was one of the first constructed by James Watt. It was then considered to be a machine of colossal power, and was designed to draw out the water from the Gregory Lead Mines. The well was three hundred and twenty yards in depth, and the wealth of the mine it made safe for working was greater than that of any fabled mine in Mexico or California. But the mine is exhausted, and only the ruined tower remains to remind one of the ponderous beam that used to vibrate, a miracle of mechanism, in the days gone by. . . . . Another mile and then we stand on the edge of the table-land. This is the Carolina Country, why so called I know not. One farm is North Carolina ; another South Carolina. To the left we have a sight of what might be a bit of Haddon Hall. It is the gray, old embattled tower of Dethick, the chapel which is an off-shoot of the mother-church of Ashover. All that is left of the old hall of the Babingtons is a farm-house at the east end of the church. The hamlet of Lea closely adjoins that of Dethick, and Derbyshire contains no country-side more quaint, irregular, withdrawn, and secluded. Below stretches the Matlock valley from Ambergate to Bakewell, a sudden theatrical surprise in scenery. The valley stretches under swelling hills from below Crich Stand in one direction to above Stanton Woodhouse in another. Today the hilly ridges swim in a sort of silvery mist that Turner has sometimes caught when he wished to idealise distance. The panorama is, perhaps, the finest in the whole of the Peake Countrie, and the most prosaic of persons might be challenged to pass it without pausing in admiration and wonder. The walk down hill to Matlock, through the idyllic village of Tansley, musical with rushing waters working the mills, is not the least picturesque feature of the day. Then past Riber Castle, with its mock mediævalism, sheer down into Matlock; but Matlock seems pinchbeck and common after our six miles ramble—such a six miles as is to be met with nowhere else save in "Undiscovered Derbyshire." [The chapter was first published in its entirity in the "Derbyshire Times", 30 September 1882.] |
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*Transcribed by Ann Andrews in December 2025 from her personal copy of the book. Bradbury, Edward (1884) "All about Derbyshire." With sixty illustrations by W. H. J. Boot, J. S. Gresley, W. C. Keene, L. L. Jewitt, G. Bailey, J. A. Warwick, R. Keene, and others. Simpkin Marshall, London : Richard Keene, All Saints', Derby. Images © Copyright Ann Andrews collection. Intended for personal use only. |
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Related pages elsewhere on this website:
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Lumsdale
Riber Castle