Derbyshire
The Shape of It
A county of two complexions, divided down the middle by time and rock.
Derbyshire splits cleanly in two. The northern and western part is the Dark Peak: gritstone moorland, peat bogs, steep-sided valleys, and a sky that seems permanently in discussion with itself. The southern and central part is the White Peak: a limestone plateau of dry-stone walls, clear rivers, and villages built from the same pale rock they sit on. The boundary between them is sharp enough that you can stand on it.
The limestone of the White Peak formed on the floor of a tropical sea, when what is now Derbyshire lay south of the equator. It has been folding and dissolving for 300 million years, and the results are spectacular: caves, gorges, natural arches, and sinkholes that open without warning in fields. Peak Cavern at Castleton — which for centuries bore the more descriptive name The Devil’s Arse — has the largest natural cave entrance in Britain. It was still occupied by rope-makers well into the nineteenth century, their cottages built inside the cave mouth like something from a fairy tale.
Arbor Low, on the White Peak plateau south-west of Bakewell, is the “Stonehenge of the North”: a henge monument of fifty-odd limestone slabs, all fallen flat, encircled by a bank and ditch. It is roughly 4,500 years old. Nobody put the stones down deliberately; they fell over at some point in prehistory and have been horizontal ever since. Visiting it requires a short walk across a working farm.
Creswell Crags, on the Nottinghamshire border, contains the most northerly cave art in Europe. The engravings — birds, a bison, a bear, and figures hard to read at any distance — were made during the last Ice Age and were not discovered until 2003, hiding in plain sight in a gorge that had been a tourist attraction for a century. Palaeolithic people had also left behind the bones of hyenas, woolly rhinoceros, and cave lions in the same caves. None of these animals are native to Derbyshire today, which probably pleases local walkers.
Repton, south of Derby, was the Saxon capital of Mercia. It is also adjacent to Heath Wood, the only known Viking cremation cemetery in Britain, with 59 burial mounds left by the Great Viking Army which wintered there in 873–874. The army’s leaders — among them the man known to history as Ivar the Boneless — apparently found Derbyshire an agreeable place to rest between campaigns. The locals may have felt differently.
Two villages in the Upper Derwent Valley — Derwent and Ashopton — were drowned to create the Ladybower Reservoir in the 1940s. The inhabitants were relocated, the buildings demolished. In dry summers, when the water drops far enough, the stumps of the old Derwent village sometimes reappear, bringing a particular quality of silence with them.
Notable Folk
Inventors, astronomers, conspirators, and the man who accidentally invented the package holiday.
The Local Tongue
A dialect shaped by Vikings, miners, and people who see no reason to close a door gently.
The Derbyshire dialect belongs to the East Midlands family, but it carries its own particular flavour — Norse in the north, Anglo-Saxon underneath, and industrial in the seams. In the more isolated villages of the Peak District, people within living memory spoke in ways that baffled the next valley over. Philip Holland, a sheep farmer and hotelier from Earl Sterndale near Buxton, spent three years interviewing over 150 people to document the vanishing vocabulary of one Derbyshire village; the result was Words of the White Peak, a reminder that every parish had its own voice. “Every village,” as a linguist put it, “would probably have its own voiceprint.”
In the Peak District, the vowel sound in words like feet and cheese was once pronounced more like fate and chays. Samuel Pegge documented this in 1896; a Survey of English Dialects recording made in Youlgreave in 1955 still catches an elderly farmer saying ninetayn for nineteen. It had survived in the more isolated rural areas long after it had been ironed out in Chesterfield market.
Place Names
A county whose place names run from the august to the bewildering to the simply rude.
Derbyshire’s place names are a palimpsest: Celtic river names underneath, then Old English, then Old Norse laid over the top of both, and finally a layer of Norman French applied to anything that looked important. The result is a map that rewards slow reading. Alsop-en-le-Dale, Chapel-en-le-Frith (the chapel in the forest), and Castleton wear their Norman French matter-of-factly; the Viking contribution shows in Thorpe, Thorp, and any -by or -thorpe ending. The River Derwent itself is Celtic: it gave its name to Derby (Déoráby, the village by the river), and the county took the name from the town.
Claims to be the highest village in England, at some 1,518 feet. The debate about this is itself a minor Peak District tradition.
The historic name for Peak Cavern, the largest natural cave entrance in Britain. Sanitised to “Peak Cavern” for tourism at some point, but the old name persists locally and is the preferred option for most visitors.
A handsome limestone village with a duck pond and a bull ring. The name means “many-coloured hill,” which is less satisfying but is what it means.
An ancient farming hamlet below Shatton Edge. The name is Old English, meaning something like “the tun at the corner of land.” Visitors photograph the sign.
Hungry is a common element in English place names meaning poor or infertile land. The village makes no particular claim to have improved.
A hamlet of limestone-walled fields at the edge of the plateau. The name is thought to refer to a hollow frequented by sparrows. This is not as interesting as it sounds, but the place is.
One of the highest villages in England, with a church whose tower serves as a landmark across three dales. The name is Anglo-Saxon: Tata’s farm.
An old lead-mining village whose main street is lined with handsome 17th and 18th-century houses built on mining money. The annual Winster Pancake Race is run on Shrove Tuesday, which means it occasionally competes for attention with the rather larger event in Ashbourne.
Pronounced “Youlgrave” by everyone who lives near it. The discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation is long-established and non-negotiable. It was here that a Survey of English Dialects recording captured, in 1955, the last traces of the old Peak vowel shift.
Famous for its well-dressing, a tradition of decorating the village wells with pictures made from flower petals, seeds, and moss. The pictures often have a religious theme and take days to construct. The wells are then blessed in a ceremony and left to rot elegantly over the following week. Other Derbyshire villages do this too; Tissington claims to have started it, after its wells provided clean water during the Black Death.
At the Table
A county with firm opinions about puddings, a banana question that matters to world history, and a dish that contains no duck.
The most contentious subject in Derbyshire food is one that locals consider closed but outsiders keep reopening: the difference between a Bakewell Pudding and a Bakewell Tart. They are not the same. The pudding — the original — is said to have been created by accident around 1820 when a cook at the Rutland Arms Hotel in Bakewell, instructed to enrich the pastry of a jam tart, instead stirred the eggs, sugar, and almond paste mixture on top of the jam. The result set like a custard over the jam and was served anyway. It was good. A shop in Bakewell still sells what it claims is the original version. The Bakewell Tart — shorter-crust pastry, frangipane, fondant icing, cherry on top — is a later, different thing that the rest of the world calls by the pudding’s name, and Bakewell residents find this wearisome.
Stilton cheese can only be legally produced in three counties: Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire. The name, somewhat confusingly, comes from the Cambridgeshire village of Stilton, where it was sold in the 18th century but never made. Hartington Creamery in Derbyshire has been producing it for generations; they once experimented with a Stilton-flavoured vodka, on the grounds that someone had to.
Derbyshire Oat Cakes are a soft, flat, pancake-like bread made from oatmeal, eaten hot with butter or cheese. They exist because oats grow better than wheat at this elevation. The Derbyshire version differs from the Staffordshire version; cross-county oat cake comparisons are a regional sport. Savoury Duck, meanwhile, is a Derby dish that contains no duck. It is a type of faggot — minced offal and herbs, usually pork-based — and locals regard the name as self-evidently fine.
The banana question is this: in the 1830s, the sixth Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener at Chatsworth, Joseph Paxton, cultivated the variety now known as Musa cavendishii. The Cavendish banana was hardier and more productive than its predecessors and became, over the following century, the variety supplied to virtually the entire Western world. Almost every banana consumed in Britain or America today descends from that Chatsworth plant. Paxton himself went on to design the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. He had learnt to build glass structures large enough to contain tropical conditions from the experience of building them at Chatsworth.
Derbyshire Oatcakes
These are not the hard Scottish kind. They are soft, thick, lacy-edged pancakes made from a batter of fine oatmeal, strong white flour, yeast, warm water, and a little salt. The yeast is the key: it gives them a faint sour depth that the unfleeted version lacks. They are best eaten immediately — draped over a bowl of soup, rolled around a filling of strong cheese, or eaten plain and hot from the griddle with too much butter. They do not keep. This is not considered a flaw.
In the 1790s, Derby had one alehouse for every sixteen residents. The oat cakes may have been viewed as ballast.
The Plague Village
What Eyam did in 1665, and why it still matters.
Eyam (pronounced eem) is a village in the limestone dales between Bakewell and Sheffield. In August 1665, a bundle of cloth arrived from London for Alexander Hadfield, the local tailor. His assistant, George Viccars, spread the damp cloth by the fire to air it, thereby warming the plague-carrying fleas that had come with it from a city in the grip of the Great Plague. Viccars was dead within a week. His two stepsons followed. Then the neighbours. By the end of September, dozens were dying.
Mompesson survived. In 1669, when he took up a living in Nottinghamshire, he had to live in a hut outside the village for some weeks because people were afraid he might still carry the contagion. He had saved the north of England from the plague; people were understandably cautious. The stones at the edge of Eyam are still there. Some visitors leave coins in the hollows. The gesture is not nothing.
Eyam became a case study for epidemic control. Epidemiologists and historians have returned to its parish records ever since — the records are unusually detailed — and the village was cited explicitly in discussions of public health during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The Plague Sunday service is held in Cucklet Delf every year on the last Sunday of August, in the same hollow where Mompesson held his outdoor services in 1666. The practice has continued for over three hundred and fifty years.
The Game
Ashbourne’s Royal Shrovetide Football, which is a game in the same sense that a flood is a bath.
Every Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, the market town of Ashbourne — population around nine thousand — boards up its shop windows, moves its parked cars, and divides itself in two. The Up’ards play against the Down’ards: born north of the Henmore Brook versus born south of it. The goals are three miles apart, represented by stone plinths built on the sites of two corn mills. The game is scored by tapping the ball three times on the plinth. A ball is sometimes goaled before midnight on the second day; sometimes not. Each ball is hand-painted and made of cork-stuffed leather, packed to float in the river, which it will enter.
- The ball may not be carried in a motorised vehicle.
- The ball may not be hidden in a bag, coat, or rucksack.
- The game may not enter churchyards, cemeteries, or memorial gardens.
- Private property must be respected.
- Unnecessary violence is frowned upon. It is not prohibited.
Note: one of the earliest rules was no murder or manslaughter. The prohibition on motorised vehicles was added considerably later.
The game has been documented in Ashbourne since at least 1667, and may be considerably older; its earliest records were destroyed in a fire at the committee offices in the 1890s. It earned its “Royal” prefix in 1922, when the people of Ashbourne sent Princess Mary a Shrovetide ball as a wedding gift — her wedding happened to fall on Shrove Tuesday — and she wrote back to bestow Royal patronage. The Prince of Wales turned up the ball in 1928 (later Edward VIII); Prince Charles did so again in 2003.
In the 1860s, repeated attempts were made to ban the game through the courts. In 1860, fifty-four players were summoned to the Magistrates Court; five were fined, including George Brittlebank, a local solicitor who had been found guilty and then represented the other accused. The campaign continued until 1891. At one point, Mrs Elizabeth Woolley saved the game by concealing the ball beneath her skirts and throwing it to waiting players before the police could seize it.
The game was played through both World Wars, at the expressed request of Ashbourne men serving at the front. It has been cancelled twice in its modern history, on both occasions due to outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease. A flood or a blizzard, apparently, does not constitute sufficient reason.
There’s a town still plays this glorious game
Tho’ tis but a little spot.
And year by year the contest’s fought
From the field that’s called Shaw Croft.
— Opening of the Shrovetide Anthem, written 1891 to raise funds to pay the fines of players summoned to court. It is sung each year at the pre-game lunch at the Green Man Hotel.
The most popular theory about the game’s ancient origins is that it began following a public execution, when a severed head was thrown into a waiting crowd. This may be true. It may be the kind of story that attaches itself to violent folk traditions without particular evidence. Either way, it does not seem to have discouraged anyone.
Did You Know?
A miscellany of the surprising, the overlooked, and the quietly remarkable.
- That the first factory in the world was in Derby? The Derby Silk Mill, built in 1721 on the River Derwent by the Lombe brothers, housed Italian silk-throwing machines and operated in continuous shifts. It predates Arkwright’s Cromford Mill by fifty years. The building is now a museum of industry and has been rebuilt after a fire — twice.
- That Richard Arkwright, who built the cotton mill at Cromford that helped launch the Industrial Revolution, is the only man ever to have become a millionaire through manufacturing, been made a baronet, and served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire, all in the same lifetime? He was also once a barber and a wig-maker.
- That the Peak District was the first National Park established in Britain, in 1951? Kinder Scout, its high point, was the site of the Mass Trespass of 1932, when several hundred ramblers deliberately walked across private grouse moor to assert the right of access to open country. Several were arrested and convicted. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 gave walkers what they had trespassed for. It took sixty-eight years.
- That Creswell Crags, on Derbyshire’s eastern border, contains the most northerly cave art in Europe? The engravings — birds, animals, possibly human figures — were made in the last Ice Age, when the cave entrance looked out over tundra. They were not identified until 2003, despite the gorge having been a tourist attraction for over a century.
- That the limestone used to build Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square came from Derbyshire? And that iron from the Stanton Ironworks at Ilkeston was used in the construction of the London Underground?
- That John Flamsteed — born in Denby, self-taught in astronomy, first Astronomer Royal — observed Uranus in 1690 and catalogued it as a fixed star? He designated it 34 Tauri. Nobody corrected the error for ninety-one years, when Herschel identified it as a planet. Flamsteed had the better telescopes of his day; it was simply that a slow-moving object in a field of fixed stars is difficult to notice unless you are specifically looking for it.
- That the Emperor Fountain at Chatsworth — the tallest gravity-fed fountain in England, its jet reaching nearly 300 feet — was built by Joseph Paxton in 1844 to impress the visiting Tsar Nicholas I of Russia? The Tsar did not come. He cancelled. The fountain operates to this day, occasionally reaching its intended height when the wind cooperates.
- That Derbyshire County Cricket Club won the County Championship exactly once, in 1936? They have not repeated the achievement since, which is the kind of fact that cricket supporters carry with a specific flavour of equanimity.
- That almost every banana sold in Britain and America today is descended from a plant cultivated at Chatsworth in the 1830s? The Cavendish variety — named after the Dukes of Devonshire — became the dominant commercial variety after its predecessor, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a fungal disease in the 1950s. The Cavendish is now also under threat from a different fungus. The banana section of the Chatsworth glasshouses is an interesting place to visit while contemplating this.
- That Samuel Plimsoll — the “sailor’s friend,” who campaigned for the load-line painted on every ship’s hull indicating the maximum safe loading — was elected Liberal MP for Derby in 1867 and held the seat until 1880? He introduced his Merchant Shipping Act in 1876 after a notorious outburst in the House of Commons in which he pointed at specific shipowners and called them villains. He was briefly suspended from the chamber. The Plimsoll line became law. He was right.
- That Lara Croft — the fictional archaeologist and adventurer — was created by Derby-based game studio Core Design in 1996? She is, by some measures, the most recognised fictional Derbyshire resident in the world, which is something.
- That in the Peak District village of Tissington, the well-dressing ceremony — covering the well heads in pictures made from flower petals pressed into wet clay — is believed to date from the Black Death, when the Tissington wells provided clean water and the village was spared? The tradition has continued, with gaps, for over 650 years. The clay pictures take a week to make and another week to rot. They are viewed seriously.
- That Repton, south of Derby, was for a time the capital of the Saxon kingdom of Mercia? And that the Viking Great Army spent the winter of 873–874 there, using the old Saxon church as a mausoleum for their dead, before moving on to conquer more of England? And that the only known Viking cremation cemetery in Britain is in a wood at the edge of the same village?
- That the first oil field in Britain (as opposed to Scottish oil shale) was discovered in 1919 at Hardstoft, near Clay Cross, by the Mexican Eagle Company? It operated until 1965. The Peak District sits on limestone, not oil; the oil is in the less photogenic eastern part of the county.
- That John Heathcoat, born in Duffield in 1783, invented the bobbin-net machine for making lace — the first machine to produce a textile that closely resembled handmade lace? Luddites attacked his Nottingham factory in 1816 and destroyed sixty of his machines. He moved to Tiverton in Devon, built a new factory on the River Exe, and eventually became MP for Tiverton. He took his machinery with him but left the Luddites behind.
This page draws on local histories, county surveys, published dialect studies (including Samuel Pegge’s Two Collections of Derbicisms, 1896, and Philip Holland’s Words of the White Peak), the parish records of Eyam, and a wide range of secondary sources. The selection and commentary are original. All errors of emphasis are ours; all genuine curiosities belong to the county.