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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