The English Administrative County of Derbyshire

Population and area summary of the County of Derbyshire

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The County of Derbyshire is located in The Midland Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 2,547Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 734,585 persons, that represents 1.49% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

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Boroughs/Districts of the County of Derbyshire

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Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Derbyshire

DERBYSHIRE in 1950

Lord Byron, who belonged to a literary period when appreciation of scenery was beginning to play a major part in the poet's consciousness, once said "There are prospects in Derbyshire as noble as any in Greece or Switzerland."

It is possible that Lord Byron's enthusiasm for Derbyshire led him into something of an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Derbyshire holds within its borders almost everything of beauty which other English counties have to show; it is England in little. If you desire rolling moor-land, Derbyshire has plenty of it; if your taste is for lonely stretches of water surrounded by hills, bleak or wooded, Derbyshire can find them for you; if you prefer the softer beauties of wooded dales and murmuring streams, they are here in plenty; little grey stone villages on grim rocky hillsides, picturesque hamlets with gardens full of flowers, gracious English manors with wide timbered parks - all these are a part of Derbyshire, the Derbyshire of grim pit-heads standing up against the wild skies of the north, the industrial Derbyshire of smoking chimneys and beating hammers, a Derbyshire of coal and iron. Each has its own beauty, each its own history.

Or if you prefer, Derbyshire is divided into two parts geographically rather than industrially. The northern end of the county is hilly, rising to more than two thousand feet in places, and is sparsely populated; the southern end is flatter, more wooded, and on its eastern side given over to coal mining and allied industries. Nor are Derbyshire people one race. The High Peak of Derbyshire has always been historically a part of England to be avoided, the Celtic type remains, direct descendants of those who took to the hills when the Romans drove their northward roads to east and west of the Pennines. The southern end of the county was overrun by the Saxons and later by the Danes to a greater extent than the more difficult terrain of the north. These have left their mark, and today as you pass from south to north Derbyshire, the change in the character of the farming community - those most likely to have remained in permanent occupation of the land - is most marked.

Not only were the Romans afraid of the wild hills of the High Peak, so that there remain in north Derbyshire only traces of three Roman settlements, Aquae (Buxton), Anavio (Brough, in the hope valley), and Melandra (Glossop), later invaders also either gave the High Peak a wide berth or took steps to tame it. No sophisticated Roman built his villa on the slopes of Kinder Scout; the inhabitants were too wild, their emotional reactions to Roman suzerainty too unreliable; and after the Romans had gone the High Peak remained still remote, still inaccessible, still dangerous. Even the Normans found them turbulent neighbours, and grim keeps, the ruins of which can be found here and there amongst the hills, remain as mute witnesses to the way in which William of Normandy dealt with the problem which the Romans had shirked.

Derbyshire is old in a way in which softer counties are not. Warwickshire and Gloucestershire have their stately Elizabethan mansions, and so, indeed, has Derbyshire, but the real affinity of the countryside seems to be with a remoter, ruder age. Civilizations have come and passed, but they have not changed or tamed the wild moorlands, and the stone circles and ancient cromlechs which are to be found in the county are somehow more in tune with it, and with the descendants, still living in Derbyshire, of the men who built them. Only in Wiltshire and sometimes on Dartmoor in Devon does one still feel today this closeness to a prehistoric past.

Derbyshire people are tough; they were tough a thousand years ago, before the Normans came, and the witness to this toughness remains today in an ancient court; still legal and still in active jurisdiction the Barmoot Court. This is a court concerned entirely with lead-mining interests; and goes right back to early Saxon times; what is more, it is the oldest survival of trial by jury in the Anglo-Saxon world. Long before Magna Carta was sealed at Runnymede, the Barmoot Court of the Hundred of the High Peak, or the Grand Barmoot Court of the Wapentake of Wirksworth, were meeting and discharging their legal functions, as they have met ever since and are meeting today. No lead may be mined without their permission, and from their jurisdiction there is no appeal save by way of certiorari. Through the changing conditions of the turbulent history of these islands, the men of Derbyshire have clung to this immemorial right, the right of determining their own disputes, and of trial before a jury of their peers. Here is sufficient evidence of character, of a toughness of fibre, of a resistance to outside dictatorship; these are the qualities of the men and women of Derbyshire of today.

Uplands and Lowlands

If the people of Derbyshire are hard, so in the northern end, at least, is the county. Here is no easy living, no generous return from an over-fertile soil. For the most part the limestone or gritstone hills are barely covered with a thin few inches of earth, from which the northern farmer wrings his reluctant crops. For the most part this end of the county is given up to pasture, little fields which on the hill-sides encroach upon the heather of the higher moors. And everywhere the little fields and crofts are surrounded by characteristic dry stone walls of the county, evidence of hundreds of thousands of man hours of patient work in the past. As the road drops from the northern to the southern end of the county, the stone walls give place to hedges, the soil deepens, more of the land is under the plough, and orchards and flower gardens begin to take on the appearance of the southern counties.

It is a mistake to imagine that the whole of the northern end of the county of Derbyshire is given over to bleak uplands and heather and gorse-covered moors. It is true that this area is called the High Peak, and it rises to Kinder Scout, two thousand and eighty-eight feet above sea level, but the flat tableland of heather and peak moss is intersected by innumerable cloughs, where the little moorland streams run down to join the Wye or the Derwent. Many of these are very beautiful, reminiscent of Highland glens, and as remote and as unspoiled as anything to be found in England. On the southern side of Kinder they open out into the lovely valleys of Edale and Hope, and many of the little streams have now been caught in the series or reservoirs, the last of which has recently submerged the villages of Derwent and Ashopton. These reservoirs from beautiful sheets of water in the midst of high bare hills, the shape of which will soon be changed when the tens of thousands of trees, planted on their sides by the local water board, grow to maturity. The county lying north, east, and west of the Derwent reservoirs is still untamed, much of it preserved for shooting, and the haunt at weekends of many hundreds of ramblers who follow the wild tracks over Bleaklow or Kinder itself. Some say all this area is to be made into a great national park, and from here will begin the projected Pennine Way which will open to the hardy walker a route over dale and hill, untouched by the motorist for a hundred and fifty miles, from Edale to the Scottish border.

But impressive and remote as are Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, it is still more impressive to stand upon some such hill-top as Win Hill, rising above the Hope Valley, or on Mam Tor, the site of an age-old British camp, looking down on the Norman keep of Peveril, and to look round at the hills, fold after fold, running away to the remote horizon. This is the real country of the Peak, foothills of the Pennines, last stronghold of the Celtic Brigantes, many of whose descendants, with their short stature and characteristically shaped heads, still farm the moorland acres.

Roman Remains

Though the Romans passed this region by on their two great main roads to the north, they ventured into the hills in their search for lead. On the moor behind Tideswell pigs of lead have been found, stamped with Roman inscriptions, dropped by some careless hand, to be found nearly two thousand years later. The Romans built their little fort at Anavio, where the River Noe winds round a precipitous knoll not far from Hope, in order to protect their lead-mining industry. But this fort, a rectangular stone building the foundations of which still remained buried under the turf, was designed also for another purpose. These rare Roman roads, leading across the hills from east to west, were strategic as well as commercial; they linked the road running north to Eboracum, our York of today, with that other road which ran northward over the causeway between the marshes, through Stockport and Manchester. It was important to Roman strategy that an army marching up one of them should be able to give support to an army on the other, and so these roads were laboriously built across the hills, the rungs in a strategic ladder.

By the year 400 or soon afterwards the Romans had gone from Derbyshire, and indeed from Britain, but they left behind them in the High Peak the shafts which they had sunk in their search for lead; for hundreds of years lead mining remained the chief and almost the only industry of this area. On the hillsides of north Derbyshire white glistening heaps of spar mark the course of the veins of ore, and until about a hundred years ago these remote little villages were alive with a mining population. Then Spanish lead, cheapened by the high percentage of silver it contained - the small amount of silver in Derbyshire lead did not pay for its extraction - killed the Derbyshire lead-mining industry; now everywhere the shafts are deserted and the working flooded, dangerous alike to man and beast. More than one unwary hiker has come by injury or death through falling down the open shafts of the old lead mines.

This northern end of the county is rich in little towns and villages of historic interest. Buxton, the spa of Blue Waters of today, is the Aquae of the Roman occupation, and Glossop, at the northern end of the Snake road over Kinder, was the Roman fort of Melandra; also there is Eyam, the heroic plague village, where three hundred years ago nearly four hundred villagers, led by their devout vicar, Mompesson, voluntarily cut themselves off from their neighbours , so that the infection should not spread. Whole families were wiped out by the terrible plague, the germs of which had come from London in a bale of clothes, and the living buried the dead in hastily dug graves in the fields. As the danger of infection made it inadvisable to assemble in the little village church, the dwindling congregation met Sunday by Sunday in a little valley running southwards from the village; here from a rocky arch, the vicar upheld and strengthened his people, and today, on the last Sunday in August of every year, the villagers go again to Cuklet Church, the name by which the valley with its pulpit rock is now known, to keep alive the memory of the heroism of their forefathers. Before the plague subsided, five out of every six has died; only thirty-five living souls heard the bells which rang out as hope changed to certainty; none had broken the vow of voluntary isolation. Their reward was an uncontaminated countryside; as a result of their selfless behaviour, no other village in the High Peak caught the infection.

In the High Peak is Peveril Castle, Scott's Peveril of the Peak, and surely one of the most romantic and forbidding of the Norman strongholds in the country. Under the very shadow of Kinder Scout, and built on the edge of the sheer gorge above Peak Cavern, Peveril is calculated to inspire sensations of awe in the most frivolous; in the days of feudal England it must have been a fortress of great strength. Even the ruined tower, which alone remains, has an air of menace, which the fact that one may inspect it for a small charge does nothing to dispel.

Peveril Castle owes much to its situation above the grim entrance to Peak Cavern, itself one of the wonder of Derbyshire. But this is no ordinary cave. Beneath the overhanging cliff on which Peveril Castle stands is a great cavern, like some mighty barbaric chamber, in which for generations the men of Castleton have lived and worked. For here, in this natural factory in the living rock, was one of the strangest workshops in the country, a workshops in which for hundreds of years, and up to the beginning of the present century, a primitive rope-walk turned out hundreds of fathoms of hand-made rope. Here was woven the rope to rig the ships which broke the Armada, and who shall say for how many centuries before that English seamen handled Castleton made rope.

All limestone country has such caverns, but there is nowhere in the country where so many underground caverns and old workings, natural and artificial, can be explored as at Castleton. From here comes the famous Blue John, a very beautiful purple variety of fluor spar, much used for ornaments and personal decoration. Castleton is not the whole of the Peak, but it is a fitting introduction to some realization of what the Peak of Derbyshire once was.

With its wild moors, its tumbling trout streams, once fished by Izaak Walton, and its rich historical associations, the High Peak of Derbyshire is a little oasis in the heart of industrial England. The great manufacturing cities of the north, Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, Halifax, Leeds, Stoke-on-Trent, Nottingham, and their lesser satellites ring it round, but it remains inviolate, defying modern industrialization, even as it defied the civilizing march of Rome.

To go south from the Peak is to drop into a different countryside, peopled by a different race, given to different pursuits, inspired by different ways of thought. South and to the east of Matlock the county is more richly agricultural, where it is not given over to coal mining and iron smelting. The hills are lower and softer in outline, there is no heather, and south of Matlock itself nothing of the outcrop rock so characteristic of the northern end of the county. Derby itself is like so many other great industrial cities, with huge railway and motor works, a cathedral and a bishop, but no adequate theatre or obvious appreciation of the Arts. It does not, however, sprawl in the way that Manchester sprawls. It is surrounded by a pleasant countryside into which its unhappy inhabitants can and do escape at the weekends. To the west is pleasant undulating country leading to Ashbourne and the beautiful valleys of the Dove and Manifold. These are probably amongst the loveliest valleys in the whole country and, together with the Peak, are already scheduled for a National Park; a great deal of the land has been acquired by the National Trust, and year by year more of this beautiful and unspoiled countryside is being conveyed to the Trust by men and women of wealth and vision. Actually, of course, these valleys are on the very edge of Derbyshire. The Dove forms the county boundary and the Manifold valley is actually in Staffordshire. But they belong to the same natural geographical unit, and it means very little to the tourist in search of natural beauty whether he has one foot over a County Council's arbitrary boundary or not.

Slightly to the east and running north from Derby is the belt of the coal-seam through such places as Clay Cross and Chesterfield, to Sheffield and beyond. This is technically a black area, but even here, in between the pit-heads, the country can still be beautiful. The huddled mining villages are without charm, but it is possible between them to stand with your feet deep in heather and look down on to the shaft-heads in the valley. A countryside of contrasts which even man has not been able to spoil.

The real Derbyshire is older, far older than man's attempt to spoil it. Its rich maturity is represented by such lovely links with the past as Haddon Hall, the perfect example of a great Elizabethan residence; but its real past lies beyond recorded history. For us it is evident in the survivals of pagan customs which still live amongst the villages, far from the railways and the great north - south traffic routes. Here every year, during the summer months, the wells are still dressed with flowers and ceremonially blessed by the local priest, hardly aware that he is performing an age-old ceremony in direct and often unbroken succession from some remote Druid who blessed these same wells thousands of years ago. The memory of old dances still lingers in spite of this machine and machine-made age, country dances of an intricate pattern found nowhere else, and soon perhaps not even to be found here. Castleton, oldest of villages, has its Garland Day, but not one of the inhabitants could tell you anything of its remote pagan origin; Wormhill has its legend of a remote gigantic serpent, handed down from the days of myths and heroes. On the moors, half-hidden by the heather, are stone circles of unknown date and unimaginable rites, on the hilltops are the burial mounds of Celts and Saxons and of the little questing men of the megalithic invasion, unnumbered centuries ago. They wandered over these hills, moving always westwards towards the setting sun, man's immemorial instinctive migratory direction, but they left their traces: a fling instrument, a scratched bone, a half-baked shard for us to find. Here is a county with a past, a present, and a future, with an industrial area and with an unspoiled, and, with its rugged physical features, unspoiled countryside on its doorstep; with a wealth of wild flowers almost under the reed of its factory chimneys, but most of all with the high places of the Peak, the heather and the gorse, the high clouds, and the lonely calling lapwing and the curlew. In its variety and its beauty this is one of the loveliest counties in England.