CHATSWORTH

From the Derwent Valley

‘The eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of the valley, into which the road wound with some abruptness . . . a large, handsome, stone building standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills.’ So wrote Jane Austen, giving Elizabeth Bennet’s account of Darcy’s stately mansion in Pride and Prejudice. She continued, ‘In front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into one greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned.’

This can only be a view of Chatsworth. The passage is known to have been written when Austen was staying in neighbouring Bakewell. The setting was perfect for Darcy’s character, half disdainful, half assured. Chatsworth does not float in the sky like Castle Howard, or roar defiance at the world, like Blenheim. For all its wealth and beauty, it seems at peace with nature and Derbyshire in one. Most remarkable, it is built of millstone grit, so often the harshest and blackest of stone, yet here displayed in what might be the golden tones of Bath.

Chatsworth has long been the seat of the Cavendishes, a local family that married Bess of Hardwick in the sixteenth century and went on to become the grandest of grandees, dukes of Devonshire, Whig, liberal, mildly progressive. The house seems at first conspicuously retiring, set off-centre at the side of its valley, glowing beneath a wooded hanger on the hill above. There is no grand avenue, obelisk or belvedere to lead the eye to the house. Chatsworth borrows privacy from its surroundings. Only at night does the view from across the Derwent burst into magnificence, indeed literally electrified by the Chatsworth floodlights. Then the house becomes a golden palace in a darkened gallery.

‘Neither formal nor falsely adorned’, Chatsworth in the eighteenth century

The first duke’s architect after the Restoration was William Talman, such that the present south and east facades were influenced by the Franco-Dutch taste of the time. Twelve even bays with no central feature gaze down the valley, crowned only with a parapet. The west facade has a small pediment and was apparently designed by the duke himself. A long basement pedestal allows for the fall of the land.

The original gardens were laid out in the seventeenth-century style, with promenades, parterres, ponds and a long cascade down the hill. A baroque temple crowned its summit. Trees were planted in formal squares. The result depicted in a Kip and Knyff print of the early eighteenth century is like a Persian carpet laid across a flat Dutch polder. Then in 1755 Capability Brown arrived from Stowe to work his naturalistic magic. Promenades became curving hill walks. Parterres became lawns. Tens of thousands of trees were planted, many from America. A portrayal by William Marlow at the end of the century shows Chatsworth as if returned to the Derbyshire countryside.

The Regency brought another change. In 1826 the twenty-three-year-old Joseph Paxton, who had been working at the Horticultural Society’s garden in Kew, resumed where Brown had stopped. His diary describes his first day:

I arrived at half-past four o’clock in the morning . . . As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole of the place, setting the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.

Such energy led to giant rockeries, arboretums, pinetums, azalea dells and ravines. Paxton built the largest glasshouse in the world (now demolished), the highest gravity-fed fountain and an extravagant lily house, model for his later pavilion at the Great Exhibition in Kensington. He refashioned the hamlet of Edensor on the opposite side of the valley as a model estate village.

When Queen Victoria visited Chatsworth in 1842 she wrote in her diary that Paxton’s works were ‘the most stupendous and extraordinary creation imaginable’. He became rich and was knighted by the queen, a paragon of Victorian upward social mobility. The duke called him ‘the least obtrusive of servants . . . and a friend if ever man had one’. Paxton made Chatsworth a wonder of England.

The view today is much as Brown and Paxton left it. The glass-house has gone, and a Victorian wing been added with a prominent tower to the north of the house. Later dukes have contributed to the margins, with a kitchen garden, a sensory garden, a sculpture garden, a cottage garden and a maze. But what we see from the distance is a respectful marriage of architecture, landscape and nature.

The house has been open to the public every day since the coming of the railway, with instructions from the duke that ‘even the humblest’ be shown everything. Already by 1844, 80,000 visitors were arriving each year, a figure that is now close to a million. They come to see not just a great garden and great house, but one of the finest private collections of paintings in the country. Though owned by a trust, it remains the Devonshire family seat, testament to the English genius for social continuity.

DOVEDALE

From Thorpe Cloud

Where lies England’s north–south divide? For some southerners it is Potters Bar, for some it is the Trent, while a true Northumbrian puts it at the Tyne. My north starts where the rocks age and the contours tighten north of a line from Stafford to Derby. It starts with the noble Peak District.

‘The Peak’ was the first of England’s national parks, declared in a burst of post-war welfarism in 1951. It has become the most visited such public space in the world after Japan’s Mount Fuji. The gentler southern half is known as the white or low peak, a landscape of rounded limestone hills and dales, its economy once dependent on rich deposits of coal. Yet these hills have many moods, as they flex their muscles in preparation for the great Pennine heights ahead.

If the Peak needed a gateway it would be through the dark gorge of Dovedale. The mouth of the gorge, round which visitors swarm in their thousands on all but the wettest days, is overlooked by two hills, Bunster Hill and the cone-shaped Thorpe Cloud. The latter rises over the confluence of the Dove and the Lin Dove streams. Dove is from the Anglo-Saxon dubo, or dark, while cloud is a corruption of Old English clud or hill.

Thorpe Cloud’s cone is the geological relic of a reef knoll, or pile of underwater coral once buried in the surrounding limestone. The climb to its summit takes just twenty minutes from the main dale car park, but is enough to take us clear of the crowds on the valley trail. From the top is a view both up the gorge and out from the mouth over the lower Dove valley. To the north the Peak District begins in earnest with the Manifold valley.

The rocks overlooking the gorge take many sculpted forms, with names such as Jacob’s Ladder, the Twelve Apostles and Lover’s Leap. The last relates to a girl who, on hearing her lover had been killed in the Napoleonic wars, hurled herself from its heights. She was saved by her skirts catching on branches as she fell, and duly discovered that he had not been killed after all. Another version has a girl throwing herself off after being jilted by her lover. She landed unhurt in a bush, walked home and lived happy, and single, ever after. Such tales attach to most English ‘leaps’.

Gateway to the Peak: Bunster from Thorpe Cloud

Over the river below are stepping stones, inserted for visitors by the Victorians. They now fight a running battle with health-and-safety officialdom, terrified someone might slip into two feet of water. A different battle is fought with erosion. Walkers understandably claim untrammelled access to nature, but in such numbers that nature is increasingly pleading for relief. How future generations will handle Dovedale is a mystery, unless it has timed tickets as in a blockbuster exhibition.

The view out of the dale to the south reinforces the sense of this being a north–south border. The Dove valley stretches a softer, more subtle landscape towards the rolling hills of Cannock Chase. In the middle distance lies Ilam Hall and village with, in the foreground, the hotel named after the Staffordshire author, Izaak Walton, whose Compleat Angler of 1653 did much to bring crowds to these limestone trout streams. I rarely plead for more trees, but some are surely needed to hide this hotel from view.

KINDER SCOUT

From White Brow Hill

Kinder Scout is the high gritstone plateau that forms the summit of the Dark (or High) Peak. Its long escarpment overlooking Cheshire and Lancashire long stood as a tantalising magnet for millions living and working in the cramped towns and cities of the industrial north-west. The Dark Peak foothills were a mere bus ride away for most people, offering those with little or no open space the promise of exercise and clear air. By the end of the Great War, the Dark Peak was a challenge to the radical mood of the day. While the ancient drovers’ tracks had customarily been open to wayfarers, a crisis came in 1932 when a group of ramblers sought access to the moors for recreation. This brought them into conflict with landowners wanting to keep the moors for grouse-shooting.

On 24 April 1932, some 400 ramblers set out from Hayfield, three miles west of Kinder, under the auspices of the British Workers Sports Federation, intent on a mass trespass. They assembled at the Bowden Bridge quarry, climbed to Kinder reservoir and struck uphill to White Brow. Here they fought a brief skirmish with the Duke of Devonshire’s estate gamekeepers and pressed on, joining another group of trespassers who had walked over Kinder from Edale to the east. On their descent, half a dozen of the Lancashire ramblers were arrested and jailed, predictably winning publicity and sympathy for their cause.

The trespass spread, with thousands subsequently gathering at Winnats Pass under Mam Tor, and in the south at Leith Hill in Surrey. Most landowners avoided confrontation by turning a blind eye. The result was an ineffective Access to Mountains act of 1939, but more crucially the setting up of national parks after 1950. Continued pressure achieved little for half a century, until the 2000 ‘right to roam’ act gave public access, where designated, to moors, heaths and coast.

Right to roam: 1932 mass trespass on its way to Kinder Scout

In 2002, on the seventieth anniversary of the Kinder Scout trespass, a more liberal Duke of Devonshire summoned a rally to the quarry at Bowden and publicly apologised for the ‘great wrong’ done by his grandfather. A plaque at Bowden Bridge car park commemorates this generous act. The Ordnance Survey now firmly marks Kinder Scout an ‘access area’.

The classic Kinder Scout view is from the summit of the ridge at Kinder Downfall, a thirty-metre waterfall with the longest drop in the Peak. It is impressive only in spate, when a swirling wind sometimes funnels up from below and sends the water not down but up, in an impressive spume. Those familiar with the Peak may feel that upward driving rain is no novelty in these parts.

Kinder plateau towards Cheshire plain

The moor plateau is blasted by wind and often bare even of a dressing of peat or soil. Mark Richards in his survey of walks in the High Peak deplores its image as ‘bleak, boggy, boring moorland, redeemed but briefly from eternal damnation by King Downfall’. I fear the geology is against him. Millstone grit (or gritstone) is an unyielding rock that seems to feed off soot and rain, moisture turning it from grey-brown or russet to coal black. Small wonder grit has lent its name to north country machismo.

Since Kinder Downfall is well beyond my half-hour climb limit, I choose the viewpoint from White Brow Hill below. This has other advantages. From here we can sense the majesty of the great bowl of Kinder reservoir, while the Kinder ridge towers menacingly overhead. These slopes feel still inhabited by the ghosts of the trespass, as if the mountain itself wished to forbid access. They are a store of ancient peat, to conservationists more precious and ‘rarer than rain forest’. They contest these uplands with the grouse and the meadow pipit. The most audible bird, the curlew, has a sad cry.

To the west is a sweeping view across the north coast of Wales to the Cheshire-Lancashire plain, with Manchester and Liverpool in the distance. Once these cities would have been enveloped in thick clouds of pollution. That is no more, which is some progress.

MAM TOR

To Stanage Edge

Which view: from Mam Tor to Stanage Edge or from Stanage Edge to Mam Tor? The Peak District has the finest views in England outside the Lake District, with a drama that seems to benefit from wild fluctuations in weather. I have stood on Mam Tor and watched heavy snow clouds spilling blizzards down Edale from Kinder, while a warm sun to the east was illuminating the Hope valley towards Stanage. Equally I have stood on Stanage Edge and watched a shaft of sunlight move over that same valley, turning the prominent Hope cement works into a ghostly white galleon, tossing on a sea of rain. This country has no need of blue sky. In the Dark Peak, fine weather is for the feeble.

Of the two prospects, that from Mam Tor has my vote. It forms the southern end of the ‘great ridge’ walk between the Hope and Edale valleys. Its name means mother mountain, so called for the instability of its gritstone on layers of shale. They form unhappy bedfellows, slithering off each other and leading to frequent landslips, creating heaps of debris round its base. When Daniel Defoe was writing up his travel notes during the 1720s, Mam Tor was known as the shivering mountain.

‘Shivering mountain’: Mam Tor looking over Hope to Stanage Edge

Most of the eastern flank, facing Hope, is now a dramatic landslide scar above a field of debris, its so-called backscarp a full 70m high. In 1979 the main road up from the valley, built in the 1800s, had to be closed, its pavement found to be six feet thick from constant past attempts to secure it. It remains closed and only the steep Winnats Pass offers access to Mam Tor from the south. The ground underneath is a warren of limestone caves, including the celebrated Blue John cavern. Its multicoloured, crystalline stone has been prized since Roman times.

The summit of Mam Tor is easily reached from a car park. The view back over the Hope valley begins with the great landslip scoop. On all its sides are signs of Bronze and Iron Age settlements, in irregular mounds and ramparts. The caves beneath have yielded copious human and animal remains. Far below, the road snakes down Winnats Pass to Castleton, Hope and Hathersage, with Stanage Edge surging up onto the skyline in the distance.

North over Edale the view is quite different, a majestic sweep of bare mountain and fertile lowland. The Edale valley seems isolated beneath the harsh and towering Kinder plateau, like some private kingdom in the Himalaya. It was from here that the 1932 marchers set out to meet their co-campaigners from Manchester in the great Kinder Scout trespass. I am told that on a clear day the towers of central Manchester are visible.

To the south of Mam Tor is a landscape of softer hills towards Staffordshire and the Low Peak, a patchwork of light green fields and dark forests. Kinder suddenly seems far away.

THE ROACHES

Towards Leek

The Roaches lie across the Staffordshire landscape like the jagged back of a giant dinosaur. They are a coarse ridge of hard red sandstone grit, standing high above the Tittesworth valley north of Leek. In winter snow the ridge can look Alpine. Its slabs of rock offer ideal practice routes for climbers but for walkers they can be lethal, unsignposted and dangerous when wet. The scramble along the Roaches is considered the best in the Peak District.

The ridge extends for three miles at a height of some 500m, from the detached southern cone of Hen Cloud (steep hill in Anglo-Saxon) to Roaches End at the north end, where it descends to the eerie chasm of Lud’s Church and Hanging Rock. The climb from the valley road takes half an hour, rising from lush meadows to peaty moorland, in places stripped to bare rock by the wind.

A path leads along the rear of the ridge, but to get a good view we must strike up onto the actual rock face, the easiest path being from the south. The chief view is of the rocks themselves, their name taken from the French for rocks, roches, and dubbed the Five Clouds. They are composed of a gigantic tilted slab of stone, formed into a jumble of triangles set on edge. With the sun on them at dawn or dusk, the sandstone glows a deep, magnificent red. The rocks are undercut and rounded into natural sculptures by wind and rain. I detected a whale, a lion’s head and a devil’s chair.

Staffordshire Alps: the Roaches towards Tittesworth

Climbers give each of the ascents a different name, the Valkyrie, the Sloth, the Mangler and Saul’s Crack. Each climb seems to have queues waiting to scale them. On a busy day the rocks echo with the clink of equipment and the shouts of instructors. A British Council for Mountaineering hut sits in a spacious pine wood on the slopes below. It is named after Don Whillans, a mountaineer who, with Joe Brown, did much to popularise rock climbing on the Roaches and elsewhere.

The finest view from the Roaches is south-west over the Churnet valley to the Tittesworth reservoir, built in the 1960s. Beyond it lies the town of Leek with its prominent steeple. This is fertile country, stretching out towards the Cheshire plain with the uplands of Wales and Snowdonia in the distance. To the north is the higher land of the Peak District.

Eastwards behind the ridge the landscape is quite different, a barren moor of heather and moss, interspersed with pools. Sheep wander past derelict cottages. The Roaches are one of England’s strangest places, one minute almost a playground, another a mysterious and frightening moonscape, reminiscent of Australia’s Ayers Rock.

That may be why a local zoo released a group of Bennett’s wallabies here in the 1930s. The creatures are unobtrusive. Sightings continued infrequently, but none has been confirmed since 2009. Two yaks released at the same time died in the 1950s. The rocks are a more successful habitat for nesting peregrines.