Wirksworth

All Man-Made At Derbyshire’s Middleton Top

It was a gloomy September afternoon when we visited these relics of the Cromford and High Peak Railway just outside Wirksworth in Derbyshire. It is a truly remarkable piece of early railway engineering. The challenge was to make a viable transport route over the High Peak in Derbyshire to Manchester: Derbyshire coal and finished manufactured goods to go to the city, raw cotton for the East Midlands textile factories to come the other way. The line of rail was surveyed by Josias Jessop in the late 1820s, and his solution to surmounting the seemingly impossible limestone uplands involved the construction of 9 inclined planes (5 up and 4 down).

The 33 miles of line was the first long distance railway to be built anywhere. It also preceded the introduction of steam locomotives, which had not quite been invented in 1825 when the original Act of Parliament was drafted, though the Act did make provision for their presumed arrival. Instead, stationary steam engines, housed in august ecclesiastical looking buildings like the one seen here, provided the power to haul the goods wagons up and down the inclined planes. On the flat stretches, and until the arrival of the expected steam locomotives, horses and donkeys pulled the wagons. In 1831 it took two days to travel from one end of the line to the other.

The steepest stretch was up to Middleton Top from Cromford Canal. Within the short distance of 5 miles the railway had to climb over 1,200 feet, requiring five inclined planes with stationary steam engines to do the job. The Middleton Top engine house (below) still has its fully operational Butterley beam engine, which is shown off from time to time during open days, but not on the day when we were there. (Sorry, engine enthusiasts – no hiss of steam or magic whiffs of burning coke and hot grease).

Middleton Top steam engine house

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These days most of the line has gone and the old track bed provides 17 miles of fine walking and cycling on the High Peak Trail which in turn joins up with other walking routes that cover 120 miles of the magnificent Peak District. The men who toiled on this line, or in the quarries and mines whose produce it carried, or the women and children who worked in the textile factories served by it, would not have believed this transformation – from the mass-production-imperative of the Industrial Revolution that gave workers little respite from their heavy labours or work-induced diseases, to a mass health and leisure facility for the citizens of several nearby conurbations. No smoke or chemical fumes or mine dust or cotton lint to inhale day in and day out, just the wide open country and the time and space to breathe and simply be. Freedoms and landscapes to treasure then.

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P1050679 Middleton Top quarry

Redhill limestone quarry at Middleton Top, opened in the early 1900s to take advantage of the nearby Cromford and High Peak Railway.

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This happy chap has just wheeled his bike up 700 metres of the very steep Middleton Incline, and presumably the inclines before it. The trackway varies in steepness between 1 in 8 and 1 in 14. In its working days, there were up and down rails side by side, the trucks raised and lowered on heavy steel cables.

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Meet T’owd Man ~ AKA The Old Man Of Wirksworth

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He is said to be 800 years old, or thereabouts, this mythic little figure of a lead miner with his pick and kibble (basket). He is presently to be found embedded in the wall inside St. Mary’s Church in the Derbyshire Peak District town of Wirksworth. But this was not his original home. He once lived in the nearby village of Bonsall, where he was found during the restoration of the 13th century  parish church of St. James. This was in 1863, and it was then that T’owd Man found his way (along with other pieces of interesting medieval stone work) into the garden of one Churchwarden Coates.

This highhanded commandeering of the local lead miners’ talisman did not please the general populace, who wanted him restored to sacred territory. Somehow in the argy bargy he ended up being firmly mortared into the wall of St. Mary’s Church in Wirksworth instead – where he has remained ever since for his own good and general safekeeping. He has also become the town’s ‘unofficial’ symbol, so you can pay him a visit, AND get the tee shirt.

But this story of general displacement is making me wonder. What  if T’owd Man is a good deal older than is currently thought.  I’m assuming his 13th century date was given him because he was found in a church of 13th century origins. But to my eye he could easily be a Saxon carving. What if the medieval builders of the Bonsall church had also recycled him?  (There are in fact many examples of Saxon carving within St. Mary’s, all re-deployed from an earlier church. See my post Expressions of Power  ~ Secular and Spiritual? for more of the background history).

Lead mining was a key industry in the area from at least Roman times. There is also documentary evidence of its importance in Saxon Wirksworth. In 835 the township was ruled by Abbess Cynewaru, and in a missive of that time she states that she was every year sending a gift of lead valued at 300 shillings to Christ Church, Canterbury. Much later in the Domesday Book of 1086 the entry for Wirksworth includes 3 lead works.

Wirksworth was in fact the centre for the trade. It was a hard and dangerous business. The miners were also a maverick lot. Many were yeoman farmers who combined hill farming with lead working, and some grew extremely rich on the trade, although many died from explosions in the mines, and the general toxicity of working with lead.

All the miners’ activities were subject to a system of rigorous rules and regulations overseen by the Barmaster of the Barmote Court. This court was held in Wirksworth for at least 7 centuries, and had its origins in Saxon Burg Moots (moot is Saxon for gathering or assembly). The last version of the court or Moot Hall still survives. It was built just out of the town centre in 1814 to replace a grander Moot Hall that stood in the Market Place. It seems the noisy behaviour of the miners, and the congestion they caused in the town centre, led to the earlier building being demolished.

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Wirksworth is a fine town for a visit. Its many surviving seventeenth and eighteenth century houses attest to the general prosperity of the place over many decades.  When the lead ran out in the 19th century, limestone quarrying replaced it. Rivers were harnessed to power cotton mills, and so the industrial age kicked in. And if this smacks too much of ‘dark satanic mills’, don’t you believe it. The town sits in glorious countryside, in the heart of England, in fact at ‘its very navel’ as one-time resident D.H. Lawrence put it. Here, then, are some more views from England’s very green and pleasant navel:

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copyright 2017 Tish Farrell

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Expressions Of Power ~ Secular And Spiritual?

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These Saxon carvings in Wirksworth’s St. Mary’s Church in the Derbyshire Peak District are around 1,300 years old. They appear to have been randomly placed in the walls during the rebuilding of the church during the thirteenth century. Nothing more is known about them, or of their precise age and origins.

At the time they were carved, Wirksworth, located in the English East Midlands, was part of the great Saxon kingdom of Mercia, whose kings and sub-kings held dominion over most of England between AD 600 – 900. i.e. until the Vikings arrived and spoiled it all with the imposition of Danelaw.

Mercia also included my West Midlands home county of Shropshire and, though seventy odd miles apart, it turns out that Saxon, and indeed later, Wirksworth has much in common with Much Wenlock; so much so, I think the towns should be twinned.

One of the Mercian kings’ cunning strategies to cement their power over their extensive territory was the spreading of Christianity, and the setting up of religious foundations and church minsters on their royal estates. These were ruled by abbesses, kings’ daughters and noble women who had been thoroughly educated for the job.

In Much Wenlock we have Milburga, daughter of King Merewald  who ruled over the Wenlock dual monastic house (monks and nuns) from around 680 AD. Her sisters and mother also had charge of religious houses across Mercia, and this function further included the management of the considerable estates and the resources that went with them.

The spread of Christianity across Mercia had its beginnings some thirty years earlier when Elchfrida (also Alchfliad), daughter of King Oswui of Northumbria married Peada, son of Penda, the last great pagan king of Mercia. According to Bede, Oswui had murdered Penda, and the later marriage of his daughter to Penda’s son was part of a peace treaty between Northumberland and Mercia, conditional on Mercia adopting the new faith. Elchfrida thus travelled south into Mercia with an entourage that included missionary priests, and it is supposed that one of them, Betti, founded the church at Wirksworth in 653 AD.

Which brings me back to the Saxon carvings. We clearly have a king. And so perhaps also his queen? It would be nice to give them names – say, Elchfrida and Peada? On the other hand the looks they are giving us are a little disturbing; Sphinx-like, enigmatic; as if they know something they cannot now reveal. Even the wild boar that has been popped in beside them by the thirteenth century mason re-cyclers looks to have something worrying on his mind.

But there is a post-script to this story. It would seem that not long after the marriage, Elchfrida betrayed her king, which led to his murder. For a brief time, then, her father King Oswui held sway over Mercia, until the uprising of 658 AD when another of Penda’s sons, Wulfhere, restored Mercian authority. It makes one wonder if Elchfrida, Christian or not, wasn’t a double agent all along. I wonder what became of her.

Wulfhere apparently went on to implement the ‘dynastic power and faith’ model with the founding of Repton Abbey near Derby. Here he installed his daughter Werburgh (later sanctified like Much Wenlock’s St. Milburga) as the first abbess. So here we have yet another example of ‘Princess Power’ Saxon-style – of royal women extending and consolidating the temporal power of their fathers through the exercise of spiritual authority.

Back in Wirksworth a document from 835 AD indicates that at this time the Wirksworth township was under the jurisdiction of Abbess Cynewaru. But there was serious trouble afoot. It seems she was being forced to cede some of her land holdings to Duke Humbert of Tamworth. She was especially afraid that this would compromise the sending of a gift of lead, valued at 300 shillings, which she made every year to Christ Church, Canterbury. (Wirksworth had been an important lead-mining area since Roman times).  Just to make sure that Duke Humbert knows where his duty lies, and who has the upper hand spiritually speaking, she proclaims in the charter that ‘if anyone should take away this my gift from Christ Church, Canterbury, may he be smitten with perpetual anathema, and may the devil possess him as one of his own.’

Fascinating stuff all this power-wielding.

copyright 2016 Tish Farrell

 

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