Geological Foundations

Derbyshire is a mineral rich county and has a unique geological structure which is reponsible for over seventy different minerals and their derivatives, varying from coal to gold, and including silver, copper, and lead in it’s many forms – and the unique Blue John which is found only in a small area around Castleton in the north of the county.

Indeed, it is this geological foundation which gives Derbyshire it’s most diverse landscape and makes the county such an attraction for residents and visitors alike. It has also provided wealth and employment ever since the Roman’s first exploited the area and mined lead here two thousand years ago, but for the literal `foundation stones’ of Derbyshire we have to go much further back in time than this, almost all the way in fact, to the very beginning of the Earth itself.

350,000,000 years ago

Scientists with far longer memories – and a greater expertise in calculus than I – estimate that the earth is between four thousand five hundred and five thousand million years old, give or take a few hundred million years!

On such an incomprehensible timescale, the formation of the rocks which underpin the geological foundation of Derbyshire appear to be relatively modern, being formed during the Lower Carboniferous period – a mere three hundred and forty five million years ago.

The oldest of the exposed rocks in Derbyshire’s Peak District are from this period and are thus termed Carboniferous Limestones, deposited over a period of twenty million years in the bed of a shallow, tropical sea which covered the area.

This small shallow sea, or tropical lagoon, was fringed by a series of reefs beyond which lay a wide deep ocean, and on today’s map would have covered an area approximately twenty five miles long and ten miles wide.

Stretching from Castleton in the north to Ashbourne in the south, and from Buxton in the west to Matlock in the east, it formed the area now known as the `White Peak’ – the name itself derived from the white limestone rock of the area. Beyond the reefs which formed the fringes of this shallow sea – (which can be traced by following the outline of the White Peak area on a modern map) – a deep water basin covered the rest of the county, and a series of volcanoes spewed ash and molten lava into the shallow lagoon.

Evidence of volcanoes is visible in an area to both north and south of Tideswell, around Mam Tor, and to the south west of the Matlocks.

The tropical shallow lagoon supported a large and diverse population of marine life, like corals, brachiopods and crinoids which lived on the floor of the lagoon, and their shells were made up of calcium carbonate. When they died they settled on the sea bed, and covered quickly by lava and ash which formed a sediment, many became fossilised. Fossils of all these primitive sea creatures can be best evidenced today in the exposed Carboniferous Limestone stratas at various places in the White Peak, such as at Lathkill Dale, near Youlgreave, and at Middleton near Wirksworth.

Over a period of twenty million years countless numbers of dead sea creatures accumulated at the bottom of the lagoon, and mixed with lava and ash from the erupting volcanoes, after consolidation, became the limestone rock, which is evident today.

Globetrotting British Isles!

A glance at the simple palaeogeographical illustration of the Peak District in the Lower Carboniferous period, with the warm tropical waters of it’s shallow lagoon lapping the surrounding coral reefs above Bakewell and Matlock, and forming a chain of islands northwards from Ashbourne to Buxton may seem beyond comprehension, given our present climate. But the answer is quite simple – we’ve moved!

During the Carboniferous period, the landmass that is now Britain was situated approximately five to ten degrees south of the Equator, and enjoyed a warm tropical climate similar to that of the Pacific islands today.

Powerful and violent movements of the earth’s tectonic plates gradually moved the British Isles to it’s current position, fifty degrees north of the Equator – a journey which spanned over a hundred million years!

Derbyshire – Matrix & Crucible

It was during this period in the earth’s history, called the Permian and Triassic period, that the mineral wealth of Derbyshire was formed.

The Mineralisation, or introduction of minerals to pre-existing rocks, was created by the cooling and crystallisation of hot saline solutions which originated deep within the earth’s crust.

This was the genetic geological blueprint for the embryonic formation of the cooling liquid which ran through cracks and fissures in the limestone and which crystallised and solidified, forming the lead, copper, silver, fluorite and calcite-rich veins that later became the vast, unique mineral wealth of Derbyshire’s Peak District.

The geology of the rest of the county is divided between the Millstone Grit of the High Peak and the Shale, neither as rich in minerals as the limestone, but both bearing the coal and iron which fuelled the Industrial Revolution.

Exploitation – The Romans and Beyond

Derbyshire’s mineral wealth has been exploited almost continuously for two thousand years, with the first evidence of lead mining provided by the discovery of several pigs of lead bearing Latin inscriptions. These gave the name of the Roman Emperor, and the abbreviation `Lut’ – short for Lutudarum as the source of the lead. It is believed that Lutudarum was either a major Roman lead-mining centre, or the name given to the entire lead field of what is now known as the White Peak.

Lead continued to provide the main source of local wealth through the Middle Ages with the building of churches, abbeys, monasteries and the extensive monastic granges of the Peak District, but the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which presaged the Industrial Revolution heralded a significant increase in mineral extraction throughout the county.

Building stone, coal, iron, clays, alabaster, marble, fluorspar and an abundance of non-ferrous metals provided an explosion of industry and by the early nineteenth century Derbyshire had become the richest mining area in Britain.

The coal measures beneath the county’s eatern flank enhanced Derbyshire’s economic importance, and in Tudor times coal fuelled the brewing industry in Derby.

With the previously large forested areas having been depleted, coal was also used for limeburning, the burnt lime being spread over agricultural land and also used as a flux in metal smelting.

Major landowners like the Dukes of Devonshire and Rutland became very wealthy during the Georgian period, with the Duke of Devonshire financing the building of Buxton’s famous Crescent in the 1780’s with the profits from his copper mines at Ecton, just over the county border in North Staffordshire, which produced thousands of tons of copper used in the manufacture of armaments for the American War of Independence.

Silver and gold, as by-products of lead-mining, is also evident amongst Derbyshire’s mineral wealth. The Odin Mine at Castleton produced three ounces of silver per ton of lead ore, and small quantities of gold have been discovered at several locations, notably at Calton Quarry near Buxton.

Zinc was another source of mineral wealth and in the 1820’s some twenty-four lead-mines yeilded about one thousand tons of zinc annually for use in the production of brass.

Industrial Revolution

The most important ironstone reserves were in the vicinities of Chesterfield, Eckington, Staveley, Ripley and Alfreton and furnaces and iron works of the Industrial Revolution used vast quantities of coal and limestone in the production of water pipes, bridges, armaments and later, for the steel rails and iron locomotives of the burgeoning railway industry.

Various clays, alabaster, gypsum and marble have been mined since the medieval period, and products from Derbyshire’s widespread potteries have ranged from the brown earthenware works in Chesterfield, Whittington and Brampton of about 1680, to the later Denby Ware, Pinxton China and the celebrated Royal Crown Derby porcelain, which is still produced today.

Derbyshire stone has been used extensively in the building of Britain throughout the ages, providing material for many diverse national edifices, like the Houses of Parliament, and Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

Today Derbyshire limestone provides the majority of all road building stone used in the UK. The bedrock beneath out feet is also used extensively in the metallurgical and chemical industries, and limestone by-products are used in the manufacturing industry to help produce thousands of every day items from toothpaste to paper.

Little wonder that Derbyshire currently has the two largest limestone quarries in Europe and that 95% of all the limestone used in the UK’s commercial manufacturing enterprises comes from Derbyshire!

Blue John – Derbyshire’s Gem

Of all the rich mineral wealth of Derbyshire, perhaps the most famous is the rare semi-precious `Blue John’ gemstone, unique to the county and found only near Castleton. It is probably named from the French `Bleu Jaune’ for its banded pattern of violet blue and yellow and is a variety of fluorite or fluorspar, mined only at the Old Tor Mine, Castleton.

It is often claimed that the Romans must have discovered it in their search for lead two thousand years ago, for two Blue John urns were unearthed recently during the excavations at Pompeii.

However, it is more likely that the raw materials for the Pompeii urns came from another source of similarly banded fluorite in Southern Italy, also known to the Romans.

So rare is this banded variety of Derbyshire fluorite, and so greatly prized, that famous specimens are housed at Windsor Castle, the White House and the Vatican – and locally at Chatsworth House.

Since the late seventeenth century it has been made into ornaments, vases, bowls and jewellery for the commercial market, and is still made today at his workshops near the Blue John Mine at Castleton, by noteable Blue John expert and craftsman Edward Leonard Fisher.

The Treak Cliff mine, which produces 500 kilograms a year, is reputedly the world’s only Blue John mine.

In considering the rarity, beauty and value of the wonderful Blue John jewellery and ornaments that we see today, we should perhaps remember that the rare and valuable mineral was first made in the crucible of Derbyshire over three hundred million years ago, during the Permian and Triassic Periods of Earth history!

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Derbyshire’s Rich Mineral Wealth

Fossils

It may surprise the majority to learn that fossil hunting and collecting comes relatively high on the list of `Hobbies and Pastimes’ indulged in by the UK population, and that in fact, there are in existence a number of organisations, including a National Fossil Association, which acts as a catalyst for thousands of budding paleontologists, geologists and students of natural history – as well as those who simply hunt and collect fossils.

So what exactly is a fossil and where is the best place in Derbyshire to find them?

The National Stone Centre at Middleton-by-Wirksworth is a site designated as being of Special Scientific Interest and is crammed with ancient tropical reefs. Site paleontologist, Geoffrey Selby-Sly gives a conducted tour of the unique 340 million year old exposed fossil reef, and explains what the fossils were and how they were formed:-

“For the uninitiated, fossils are the recognised remains, such as bones, shells or leaves, or other evidence, like tracks, burrows or impressions, of past life on earth, and scientists who study such fossils are known as paleontologists.

Fossils are a vital and valuable resource for scientists who study the Earth’s history, for they help determine the record of past events that are preserved in the rock, and in effect, the layers of rock are like pages in the Earth’s book of history.

Most of the rocks exposed at the surface of the Earth are sedimentary – which means they are formed from particles of older rocks that have been broken apart by the natural forces of wind and water.

The gravel, sand and mud settles to the bottom in rivers, lakes and oceans and these sedimentary particles cover dead animals and plants in successive layers on the lake or ocean floor. Eventually with the passage of vast eons of time, the pressure on the accumulated particles at the bottom, accompanied by chemical reactions taking place, turns it into sedimentary rock, and the animal and plant remains trapped within become fossils.

Geologically most of Derbyshire is covered by limestone, with grits overlay, and with the coal measures towards Chesterfield in the eastern part of the county.

The fossils types found in the limestone are mainly marine fossils, like bryozoa, crinoids, trilobites, brachiopods, goniatites, bivalve molluscs and coral – with plant debris, like the fossilised imprint of ferns mainly found in the coal measures.

Derbyshire Screw

The most common early Carboniferous fossils found in the limestone reef at the National Stone Centre are crinoids and brachiopods, which together with other microscopic marine life, formed the bed of the shallow tropical inland lagoon here about 340 million years ago – they and and their shells became the carboniferous limestone dome of the White Peak”?.

Crinoids, also known as Sea-Lilies, looked like plants but were actually animals which attached themselves to the sea bed via a long stem.

The animal lived in a swollen cup (calyx) at the top of the stalk, with long arms attached which looked like plant fronds. These arms were used to filter food from the water.

The broken stems of the sea-lilies (crinoids) have the common name `Derbyshire Screw’ because when exposed in the rock, they look just like an embedded wood screw.

Brachiopods (Gigantoprocuctuc) – a shell fish which could attach itself to the sea bed by a stalk emerging from the rear of its shell, and bryozoa, a tiny colonial animal which resembles a small coral and grows in net like fronds, are numerous in the limestone and can be clearly seen in the exposed reef at the National Stone Centre.

The Story of Stone and specifically that of the limestone bedrock of Derbyshire is told graphically in a series of informative educational displays and illustrated guides at the NSC.

Students and interested parties can see the fossils in situ and can actually take casts of certain fossils from the exposed limestone reefs. The displays explain the dating process of the rock and thus, the fossils that they contain, many examples of which can be purchased from the NSC `Rock Shop’ for under £5, along with a fabulous collection of gem stones and other fossils from all around the world. Sedimentary rocks are formed particle by particle and bed by bed over many millennia, thus any given bed studied must be older than any bed above it.

This Law of Superposition, as paleontologists know it, is fundamental to the interpretation of Earths history and geological timescale. Layered rocks form when particles settle from water or air, and Steno’s Law of Original Horizontality states that most sediments, when originally formed, were laid down horizontally. This theory simplifies the quite complex problem of dating when considering that massive earth movements in promordial times created cracks, fissures, anticlines and different planes and levels, fracturing the horizontal beds of sedimentary rock and thrusting them upwards in a variety of directions.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English geologist and canal-building engineer William Smith, together with French paleontologists Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart discovered that rocks of the same age may contain the same fossils even when the rocks are fractured, separated and moved over long distances.

The discovery that the solid land masses, previously thought to be in a fixed global position, were in fact in a constant flux and being moved by tectonic plates deep beneath the Earth’s surface, solved the mystery of why rocks of the same age and containing similar fossils were found hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles apart. For example, as previously stated, during the carboniferous period, the landmass that is now Britain was situated about five to ten degrees south of the Equator and enjoyed a warm tropical climate similar to that of the Pacific Islands today.

Over a period of about a hundred million years, during what is known as the Permian and Triassic period, the British Isles gradually moved to it’s current position fifty degrees north of the Equator – and this explains why the fossils found in the Derbyshire limestone were once living creatures which thrived in what today seems a completely alien climate.

Because the fossils present in a rock exposure can be used to determine the ages of rocks very precisely, later scientists developed what is known as The Law of Fossil Succession, which has become vital to geologists who need to know the ages of the rocks they are studying.

Detailed studies of rocks from every part of the Earth revealed that some fossils which had a short, well known time-band of existence were prevalent almost everywhere. These are known as Index Fossils, and are vitally important for providing a fixed point in history on the vast geological time-scale during which the Earth was formed.

Fossils offer us a fascinating glimpse back into the past, in fact the earliest fossils provide our only knowledge of life on Earth in a time long before we ever set foot on the planet, and the unique Derbyshire fossils found in the reef at the NSC are some of the oldest in the world.

Fossils are the prized possessions of a growing number of avid collectors and come in all shapes and sizes; from bees in amber to dinosaur eggs, and from leaves and fish skeletons in coal seams, to ammonites and sea-lilies in limestone.

Though the Derbyshire fossils unearthed in my editorial office are uninteresting, worthless and decidedly uncollectible, the National Stone Centre has a wide range of fossils for sale on display from around the world – including a collection of dinosaur eggs – and a visit is an education and comes highly recommended.

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Creswell Crags

The earliest known record of humans in Derbyshire is evidenced by the numerous Neolithic `finds’ of prehistoric bones, flint tools and scrapers in a variety of locations; in the ancient caverns which occur naturally in the Limestone uplands, at such places as Harborough Rocks near Brassington and Thor’s Cave at the head of the Manifold Valley. Further evidence of other early settlement has also been found at Dove Holes near Buxton, and along the gritstone edges to the east of the Derwent Valley, notably at Gardom’s Edge, between Baslow and Curbar.

But the best known of these prehistoric dwelling sites is in the far north east of the county alongside the South Yorkshire/Nottinghamshire border, where an astonishing discovery in a cave at Creswell Crags has recently caused global excitement in the scientific world.

Carved twelve thousand years ago by ancient Britons, a team of archaeologists has discovered the earliest known examples of prehistoric cave art in Britain at Church Hole Cave, and the discovery – by Paul Banh and Paul Pettitt, with Spanish colleague Sergio Ripoll – has triggered considerable scientific excitement for it fills a major gap in Britain’s archaeological record.

Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London called it “A truly wonderful discovery, and said there are fine examples of cave art in Spain and France, but none had ever been found here – until now”?.

Robin McKie, science editor of The Observer revealed; “Modern humans appeared in Europe 45,000 years ago and quickly replaced the continent’s occupants, the Neanderthals. One of the settler’s first acts was to create works of art, something no previous human species is believed to have done. The best preserved of these works are the galloping horses and charging rhinos painted on cave walls at Lascaux and Chauvet in France, and at Altamira in Spain. But none had ever been found in Britain, probably because our climate had destroyed them, even though the British Isles were linked to the continent around this time, and the country was inhabited”?.

Creswell Crags has been referred to as `The Cheddar Gorge of the North’, and the Somerset cave system at Cheddar has been the site of several archaeological `hoaxes’ during the past century. The supposed `cave art’ associated with the famous Piltdown Man discovery sixty years ago, proved as false as the skeletal remains, and the hunt for ancient British cave art has been littered with embarrassing false leads. Archaeologists claimed in 1918 that a series of red stripes painted in a coastal cave in Wales was a prehistoric painting. Only later, when the stripes started to fade was it realised they had probably been created by a sailor cleaning his paint brush!

Oldest in Britain

But the latest Creswell find is the real thing, as the archeaological team reveal in the journal `Antiquity’, they targetted Creswell Crags `because its caves are known to be the oldest recorded habitations in Britain which were occupied by humans in paleolithic times’.

In the nineteenth century archaeologists discovered a 12,000 year-old bone needle in Church Hole cave, and it is in the same cave that Banh and Pettitt discovered the two engravings in June 2004. Both are similar in style to the cave art of France and Spain, although according to BBC Science editor Dr. David Whitehouse, they lack the same sophistication.

The 12,000 year-old art work consists of three animal figures etched into the stone of the cave wall; one appears to be a crane or swan, and another a bird of prey. The third engraving is believed to represent an ibex, an animal not previously thought to have existed in Britain.

Nigel Mills, manager of the Creswell Heritage Trust said of the latest finds, “These discoveries show how important Creswell Crags are in global terms. Twenty thousand years ago the edge of the northern ice cap was only thirty kilometres north of Creswell, so this was the most northerly place known to have been visited by our ancestors during the last Ice Age”?.

The cave dwellings at Creswell Crags are situated on either side of a narrow magnesian limestone gorge, several feet above its floor, and are remarkable not only for the remains they reveal of occupation by early hunting communities during the last Ice Age, but also for the timespan of intermittent occupation covering tens of thousands of years during the inter-galacial periods.

The sequence of human occupation at Creswell began around forty to fifty thousand years ago with the Neanderthals, who lived in dwellings which were given fanciful names following the nineteenth century discoveries, such as Mother Grundy’s Parlour, Church Hole, Pin Hole and Robin Hood’s Cave. As Joy Childs writes in her `History of Derbyshire’:

“The Neanderthals comings and goings were superseded by the arrival of homo sapiens in the area late in the Old Stone Age. A warm interlude ended 27 – 28,000 years ago and then reoccupation of the caves was not possible until 13 – 11,000 years ago, at the beginning of the period nowadays termed post-glacial”?. It should be noted that this is exactly the time period of the latest discoveries.

Joy Childs concludes; “When the first groups took up habitation at Creswell the last advance of the great Ice Age had not yet begun, but by the time the final groups left, the ice had fully retreated and forest growth was once again being established”?.

The nineteenth century archaeological discoveries at Creswell include the figure of a masked man engraved on a piece of bison rib; a fish pattern on a mammoth’s tusk; a reindeer rib adorned with a chevron pattern, and oldest of all, a horses head on another fragment of rib bone. Weapons and utensils were also found, like a dagger made from the spine of a mammoth, and drinking vessels fashioned from woolly rhinoceros bones.

Pin Hole and Robin Hood’s Cave lie on the northern side of the gorge and here were found the bone carvings of the masked man and the horses head, whilst Mother Grundy’s Parlour revealed carvings of a reindeer, a bear or bison’s head and a rhinoceros. The heads of these and other large mammals were significant finds amongst the animal bones recovered from Creswell Crags. The lower jaw bones were used as ripping tools, and sometimes the canine teeth of bears were removed for use as smaller cutting tools. Reindeer antlers were also separated from their skulls, and for example, in Pin Hole Cave, numbered over a quarter of the 4,400 cranial bones found at various levels in the earth floor of the cave.

In contrast the neatly made stone tools that were found amounted to some two hundred and forty, of which less than a third originated from the cave’s Neanderthal residents.

Creswellian Culture.

This shows the advances in culture and improvement in climate between the earliest Neanderthal inhabitants, who relied mostly on bone implements, to the advanced homo sapiens who lived in the area twelve thousand years ago and manufactured their own stone tools.

Joy Childs notes: “The enterprising inhabitants of Creswell, particularly those in Mother Grundy’s Parlour, developed their own local flint `industry’, which has become known in archeaology as the `Creswellian Culture’.

Their blades were characteristically small and blunted along one edge for holding, or setting into a handle. Creswellian products have also been found as far away as caves in Somerset and as close as Dowel Cave, at Earl Sterndale in Derbyshire’s White-Peak”?.

Creswell Crags, already famous throughout the archaeological world, and a Derbyshire tourist attraction for many years, now plans a new £4.5m museum on the site, and a £14m initiative to extend facilities in the Creswell area. The plan was already under way before the recent discovery of the cave art, but its inclusion has added a new dimension to the project.

The proposed new museum and education centre will, hopes Nigel Mills, change the prevailing view of prehistory in the UK.

“Usually prehistory starts with the Romans, with a brief look back to Stonehenge, and that’s about it. But there is much more.

The people who lived at Creswell were remarkably sophisticated, and they faced the problem of environmental change, just like we do today.

Every European country has a museum telling the story of life in the Ice Age, except Britain. We hope to change this”?.

The Trust also hopes that the artefacts removed by Victorian archaeologists and distributed to museums throughout the country will be displayed at the new centre.

Perhaps by that time, archaeologists will be referring to the famous caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, as the Creswell Crags of the South!

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The Derbyshire Peak District & The White Peak

Rock is literally the foundation stone of life on earth; Mother Natures skeleton, the frame upon which is built the flesh of the land, and the geological structure not only forms our landscape but is also largely responsible for the fauna and folia which exists upon its surface.

The Pennine Chain is known as the `Backbone of England’, running from north to south through the centre of the country, rising from the Midland Plain and continuing northward all the way into Cumbria and almost to the Scottish border.

The Derbyshire Peak District forms part of the southern Pennines, beginning at the Staffordshire border, rising from the Trent Valley and climbing the foothills as far north as the outskirts of Manchester.

There is not much flesh on the backbone at the county`s highest points in the north and west, the flesh of the land only increases the further south and east one travels.

Derbyshire is a landlocked county of dramatic and scenically diverse landscapes covering an area of almost 1000 square miles, with a multitude of contrasting moods contained within the framework of it`s boundaries, and the rock beneath the surface is entirely responsible.

The Peak District itself can be divided into two sections, the Dark Peak to the north of the county, and the White Peak to the central and south western area. The higher and wilder Dark Peak mainly consists of gritstone and shale; the White Peak is the lower carboniferous limestone area, pastoral and deeply cut by beautiful dales. In the east, beyond the gritstone escarpments which form the various `edges` – from Stanedge and Froggat in the north to Curbar, Baslow and Gardom`s Edge in the south, lie the coal measures, which extend into Nottinghamshire.

The White Peak

The carboniferous limestone forms a dome approximately ten miles across which outcrops in the central area of the Peak District National Park and is surrounded by shale and gritstone moors. This is the White Peak.

Bounded in the west by the River Dove and in the east by the River Derwent it covers an area of about 180 square miles and is dissected by a series of dales cut by water erosion. To the east it dips beneath the shale and gritstone, only to re-emerge again at Crich and Ashover.

In the heart of the White Peak there are isolated pockets of gritstone scenery rising like islands in a sea of limestone, and adding a special charm and character to the landscape is the River Wye which runs diagonally from north west to south east through the centre of the area.

Indeed, as the late Sir John Betjamin said, -“there is every kind of scenery in Derbyshire – except the sea”?. But this was not always so, for this central area was covered by a warm inland tropical ocean some 350,000,000 years ago, the remnants of which form the limestone dome of the White Peak.

Running throughout the limestone, and the source of much of the ancient wealth of the villages of the area, are mineral veins, containing lead, – the most common type known as `Galena` (lead sulphide), barytes, fluorspar, calcite, etc. – Lead has been mined in this region since Roman times and the landscape is riddled with mines and quarries, many long since closed and of great industrial archeological interest. Though the lead mining industry is now a thing of the past, limestone quarries still scar the landscape, and the region provides the country`s richest source of fluorspar, used extensively in the chemical and metallurgical industries.

This landscape had already undergone many transformations before the dawn of civilisation and has undergone many more since the advent of man, whose influence upon it goes back thousands of years.

Many hilltops are the sites of ancient burial mounds and the conical shapes of tumbled cairns can be seen throughout the White Peak.

This land has been farmed since prehistoric times when archeological evidence suggests that the limestone was first cleared of trees. Some of the area`s many caves were inhabited by our Neolithic ancestors, -and indeed, human habitation of some caves is recorded up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Stone Circles & Sacred Sites

The area is rich in prehistory and has many sites of interest, perhaps none more so than the mysterious stones and ring ditches at Arbor Low, known as the Stonehenge of the North, and the largest of Derbyshire`s ancient monuments. The Bullring at Dove Holes near Buxton is the second largest, but possibly a ring cairn as opposed to a stone-circle.

There are numerous stone-circles in the White Peak, especially on it`s eastern fringes around Stanton and Birchover and notably the `Nine Ladies’ stone-circle in a wooded glade on Stanton Moor, which is also the largest known Bronze-Age burial ground in Europe with over seventy burial mounds, barrows, and ring-cairns. This site represents one of those `gritstone islands in a sea of limestone’

Old settlements there are in plenty, some no more than grassy mounds where sheep now graze, – as at Smerrill and Ballidon, both deserted medieval villages, others still enjoying a vibrant life. Most were settled in Saxon times and the majority are mentioned in the Domesday survey.

The limestone scarcely reaches a height of more than 1000 ft and for the most part it forms a plateau, where the bones of the limestone outcrop on the shallow flesh of the land. A network of dry stone walls pattern the landscape, and countless sheep graze the upland meadows and dale-sides.

There are many rare species of plants which are unique to this location, and a rich variety of wildlife hardly rivalled by any other county in England.

It is a spectacular wonderland of breathtaking scenery, which in the winter months has been called `Little Switzerland’, – but can also be harsh, barren and unforgiving. However in full summer the White Peak is a paradise, and especially for the visitor, a place full of wonder, where a stroll across the plateau can lead to an abrupt drop into a spectacular dale, as at Lathkill Dale, Dovedale or Monsal Dale.

The Peak District National Park is the oldest and most popular of all the designated National Parks in the country with over 15 million visitors a year, and the White Peak lies mostly within it’s boundaries.

The area is renowned for the quality of it’s youth hostel accommodation and is most popular with walkers, hikers and almost every other outdoor activity including rock climbing, caving and pot-holing, camping, hang gliding, hot-air ballooning, canoing, sailing, and cycling. In addition to the hundreds of cross-country way-marked paths there are several major trails for the walker and cyclist, with cycle hire available on both the High Peak Trail and the Tissington Trail. Together with the Monsal Trail these three increasingly popular trails follow the course of old railway systems through the heart of the limestone countryside.

The ever popular Limestone Way, which for much of its length follows the ancient course of the prehistoric trackway, and later Saxon trading-route of The Portway, is a most spectacularly scenic walk running roughly in a north-south direction through the centre of the White Peak. Indeed this earliest known of the counties ancient trackways runs for 50 miles throughout the length of Derbyshire and accords the walker access to places where the peace and tranquil beauty of the landscape can be fully appreciated, without the noise pollution of traffic, industry, or crowds!

The Cradle of the Industrial Revolution

The south east corner of the White Peak provided the perfect place for Sir Richard Arkwright and Jedediah Strutt to build the `cradle of the Industrial Revolution’ complete with water-powered cotton mills, purpose-built housing for the workforce, as well as schools and a fine churches.

England’s first mass-production water-powered factories of the new industrial age were built at Cromford and later at Belper, and with the whole industrial complex now being restored and the lower Derwent Valley being given World Heritage Status, visitors come from all over the world to see the birthplace of the factory system.