Long Row | >Re-PHOTO

No Snow in Derbyshire: I’ve just looked at the weather forecast for Christmas this year and found we are expected to have day temperatures of around 13°C, dry and cloudy with a bit of sun. But back in 2010 the last ten days or so of December was considerably more Siberian and a week before Christmas we trudged through a few inches of snow with more still falling in London as we made our way to St Pancras for the trip to Belper in Derbyshire for a brief visit to our younger son and family.

For once there was no snow in Derbyshire, and the thin white sprinkling on open ground was simply frost and the streets were clear. Fortunately there was little wind and wrapped up well we went out for walks on both Sunday 19th December and Monday 20th December. As usual I took a few pictures, both in the town and on the hills around.

I’ll post a few here, but there are rather more on-line.

The daytime temperature didn’t quite reach zero – 0°C (32°F) – during our visit and the frost was building up to an unusual degree for the UK

We walked over the hills to Milford and then I think caught the train back.

Strutt’s North and East Mills on the River Derwent in Belper are a part of the of the Derwent Valley Mills given UNESCO World Heritage Status in 2001.

And the Grade II listed houses on Long Row where my son was then living close to the top of the steeply sloping street were built by the Strutts for their mill workers in a rather odd internally interlocking design.

The last mills in Belper closed in the 1990s. Until 2022 the North Mill, Grade I listed and one of the world’s first fireproof buildings was Strutt’s North Mill Museum, but then lost its funding due to Tory cuts meaning the local authority could no longer fund it. The building was Save Britain’s Heritage ‘Building of the Month‘ in September 2023 and campaigners and local residents hope it can be saved and reused.

There had been unusually low minimum temperatures – a few days earlier it had gone down to -18 C (0 F)

Many more pictures on My London Diary in Derbyshire Walks.

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Derbyshire December – In December 2017 we stayed a few days between Christmas and the New Year in Belper, where my younger son and his family were then living. Their home then was in in one of a long row of listed workers’ cottages rising up a street from the A6 close to the mill site, imaginatively called Long Row. There’s also another street a short distance away called Short Row.

The picture above is looking down from the top of the row and their home was one of those in the picture. The houses were built in 1792-7 and rather curiously interlock, I think with the stairs from one house being above the rooms of its neighbours. Now it was getting too small for them as their family grew and we stayed instead at the Lion Hotel a few minutes walk away. Fine by me as the breakfasts were better.

The other streets in the area, also built for their workers by the Strutt family who set up their mill here in 1778, were named after members of their family, including George Street and William Street.

Belper is a very pleasant small town but not the most exciting place in the country although it has a good selection of tea shops and one or two interesting pubs, and if I lived there I’d certainly became a member of the Ritz which reopened in 2006 as an independent cinema after having been closed for 15 years. And I think it is still one of few places in the country which still has a genuine local newspaper, The Belper News established in 1896, though now a part of the Derbyshire Times.

We’d visited Belper several times and in 2017 I didn’t spend long taking photographs there of the many interesting places around the town. The Mill and the area including Long Row are a part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site and well worth a visit, but we didn’t have time for that on this visit, nor did we go the the three churches set up by the Strutts as they became wealthier and moved up the social scale from Unitarian, then Congregational to Anglican.

On Friday 29th December the hills around were covered with a thin film of snow, though none had settled in Belper. The main roads had been cleared and minor roads were well gritted and my son loades a sled and children into the car and we drove to a gentle slope on the hill above Beeley village. Crowds were out on the slopes a little further on at Chatsworth but here we were on our own.

I didn’t spend much time on the sledge, and there really wasn’t quite enough snow but I did enjoy taking some pictures of the winter landscape both in the hills and in the village. Patches of mist drifted acros at times, obscuring part or all of the view.

It was time for lunch and we drove on to Rowsley and Caudwell’s Mill for some lunch and I took a few pictures of the mill and Peak Tor, a hill which was an early Celtic camp or settlement.

Sadly this grade II* listed historic flour mill, still working in 2017 is now closed and its assets were sold by auction in May 2023.

More pictures:
Belper
Derbyshire Snow

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Tag: Long Row

No Snow in Derbyshire – 2010

Derbyshire December – 2017