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Wednesday 18 October 2017

Walking the past

Yesterday found us walking the hills around Matlock. It doesn't matter where we walk, signs of the past are always there. At the end of a leafy woodland track -



- is a derelict stone building. A cottage perhaps? 


Set on a wooded hillside so probably nothing to do with farm animals. No services but lots of wood. A little further we have a chapel in need of friends which it seems to have found -


An attractive building it is too, built above a very quiet lane. Fortunately and unlike the cottage, this one seems to have friends.



5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

A nice find. Could you get in, or was it kept locked?

Sackerson said...

Nice sidelight.

A K Haart said...

Sam - it was behind a large locked gate so we couldn't even get into the grounds.

Sackers - just luck - I'm a point and shoot chap :)

Clacket said...

Bits of Derbyshire, in my limited experience, are actually ravishingly lovely and distinctive, as you illustrate. What I remember most are the indigenous peoples' quaint speech patterns compared to the demotic argot just down the road in, say, bland and characterless (but much more economically important) Northamptonshire or Bedfordshire. And these Midlanders are not even proper Northerners, tho’ but, lad! The other great place for sort of studying persistent regional dialects is Dudley (Doodley, suburb of Birmingham), where even the immigrants end up talking an extreme and comical version of Brummagem. Just exactly how does stuff happen?

Derbyshire’s other unrelated claims to fame include, oddly, being the epicentre of the Great Plague about four hundred years ago (irretrievably confused in my own and many other people's minds with the Black Death some four hundred years prior) and being sufficiently full of radon to melt your fillings.

A K Haart said...

Clacket - the speech patterns are quite varied. Round here they can be similar to D H Lawrence's Eastwood, but even over a few decades they seem to have faded to something more neutral as old mining towns become commuter towns.