Local Chat

It’s a few weeks now since I made an entry but I’m afraid we’ve been pretty boring, appointments with Dentist’s, van repairs, house maintenance and such like. We’ve managed to continue the local walks and recently met up with a local man on the Cromford canal at Ironville. He had found some old brown ceramic inkwells, probably from the 18th or early 19th century. Where the ground had been disturbed when the new cycle path was laid, the soil was full of inkwells and bits of old ceramics. Was it a canal barge load that was discarded? Was there an inkwell factory close by? I’ll probably never know but we found a couple for ourselves, one complete and one slightly damaged, they now reside in our garden along with lots of other interesting antiquities(rubbish). I feel a bit like an inland beach comber.

We also met up with a local Water Vole on one of the walks and my new camera certainly makes taking photographs easier.

We just had to get out somewhere so we decided to spend the night in the Goyt Valley near Buxton in The Peak District. Buxton, the highest town of it’s size in England is a Spa town with the Victorian Baths still in evidence. The Romans were probably the first to settle here and the town was called Aquae Amemetiae. The thermal spring water is a constant 27.5 degrees C and you can buy the bottled spring water from the little shop across the road from St Anne’s well. At St Anne’s well, if you don’t mind queuing, you can fill up as many containers as you wish, for free! It amuses us that the bottled water has a best before date, even though it’s well over 1000 years old when it leaves the spring.

The Goyt Valley was a hive of industry before the Errwood and Fernilee reservoirs were built. Pickfords removals started life here starting with Thomas Pickford in 1670 who turned to road mending and finding the packhorse trains an alternative load on their return journey from delivering quarry stone.

There was a gunpowder factory, a paint mill which had a water wheel providing the power to crush barites for the paint, farming, coal mines and a railway linking the Cromford canal to the Peak Forest canal at Whaley Bridge. It’s a very popular tourist area in good weather and has some lovely moorland walks. In late summer the hills are purple with heather and they look magnificent.

We spent another night in the Peak District near Brassington, oh how lovely and quiet it was compared with home. We live only 200 yards from the M1 motorway and just recently the wind has been from the North and we hear the constant roar from Junction 28, making the garden a no go area.

We spent the next day on the Staffordshire Moorlands, somewhere we’ve not walked in the past and we managed to park in small car park at Gradbach where an old silk mill has been renovated and is now the local Youth Hostel.

The area is called The Black Forest, sounds like a part of Germany doesn’t it? There are a lot of walks in the forest and Lud’s church is here, a natural rock formation. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time to walk up to the church so it’s a place we will certainly have to return to and get some photo’s and find out the history of the place.

Later that month we walked a footpath starting from behind Alfreton Church which leads down into the valley between Alfreton and Shirland. The views were lovely but we can’t say that it was a pleasant walk because it’s surrounded by busy roads and the traffic noise is constant.
The path took us across the Shirland Golf course and at one point you could see the footpath 200yds away, but across part of the golf course that does not form part of the right of way, so instead of making a dash for it (there were too many golfers about with long clubs and a liberal dose of barbed wire) and climbing over the fence, we took the legal route, a half mile walk including some of the busy road.

We were climbing back towards Alfreton when thirst overtook us so we stopped for the second brew of the walk (got to keep our strength up) and were treated to a Great Spotted Woodpecker flying straight towards us. Their flight is very distinctive, a flap of the wings which takes the bird up slightly in an upwards curve and then a short glide which means that it glides downwards in a curve so it’s flap, up, glide, down making a radio wave like pattern.

What followed next was fascinating, it must have been a male ‘cos it started to drum on the pylon that it landed on. The drumming noise is usually made by hammering on an old tree trunk with it’s beak, and this resonates throughout the area calling all females to step this way and telling all males to go someplace else. The noise the pylon emitted was loud and certainly resonated across the fields, so much so that two more Woodpeckers arrived simultaneously. One was certainly female and the pair flew off towards the church, an apt place to go when considering what they were going to do!

It’s amazing how much wildlife there is in the locality when you don’t have to spend all day in the office, apart from all the birds we’re seeing and hearing I’ve seen more stoats and weasels this year than I’ve seen in the last twenty.

Remember I mentioned in one entry about Shaw Wood Nature reserve and the small pits in the wood which looked like the hole left when a tree has been uprooted, well we met up with a friend, and he explained to us what the dips in the ground were. In the Depression the local poor people used to climb the hill and dig out the surface coal, I wonder if the coal mine owners allowed it to happen or whether they were ignorant of it. The contrast to today is unbelievable. It’s so difficult to imagine that the ordinary people were so poor when we take being warm and well fed so much for granted.

It’s now April and we can finally make a run for it, only for a few days but as Confucius says ‘the longest journey starts with the first footstep’ so perhaps our journey through 2007 starts with the first mile, Anglesey here we come.