Skip to main content

Derwent Valley: Bumbling along to Belper

The name Belper comes from Beaurepaire, meaning pleasant retreat, and the town certainly lived up to its name on this sunny day. Even the car park had a good view!


I started off across the market place and past St Peter's Church. There were three crosses in the churchyard and an unusual Easter garden - I've never seen one like this before.




The road went up past a dinky pub, with a view of the old mill, down by the Derwent, on my left. I would be getting a closer look later.


mill in centre, above the orange extension

The next section was a long straight path squeezed between lots of back gardens. This must have been an old route which had a modern housing estate built around it. I met nobody until, at one point, a lady cutting her hedge, another woman coming the opposite way with a pushchair, and I all converged at the same time. We made way for each other with very British apologies.


old gate posts; new houses

Eventually the path escaped from the housing estate and crossed meadows boundaried with tumbledown stone walls. I could see Heage Windmill over to my right. Passing an abandoned farm and an aluminium factory, I came out on the road to Nether Heage.


Nether Heage with windmill behind

I took a short detour into the hamlet, which totally confused the OS app. It never really recovers if you get off course, even when you join the plotted route again later on. Nether Heage contains the marvellously named Spanker pub (on Spanker Lane); a short piece of road called Guide Post, and a Methodist church clinging to the side of a hill.



A footpath, a lane, and another footpath took me over a ridge and down to Newbridge Road, which sloped steeply towards the Derwent. Just before it reached the A6, the road managed to go over one railway line and under another within 100m, which I thought was quite a feat. You can see the junction between the two lines from the bridge.




I crossed the Holly Lane bridge over the River Derwent for the fourth time - this one is definitely winning the award for the most-crossed crossing! Then it was straight up the other side of the Derwent valley, and along Whitewells Lane to Blackbrook. That diagonal line of houses is Newbridge Road, and the bank of trees to the left of the radio mast is where the land drops down to the Amber Valley. The Derwent runs right across the middle of the photo, but you can't see it at all.


Sheep, cattle, goats and geese watched me as I made my way along the lane and down towards Wyver Lane Nature Reserve. On the way was a large wall, and a sign telling me that this used to be a firing range to train the Belper Volunteers.




firing wall to the left of the road

I was confidently expecting a bench or two at the nature reserve. It would be a perfect spot to sit down with some lunch and watch wildfowl on the lake. Unfortunately, there was only a bird hide - I didn't fancy having lunch in there - and a gate upon which two people were already leaning.


So I continued along the lane to Belper, where I reached Beaurepaire Gardens. There were plenty of benches and lots to look at as well. "God bless this seat," read the memorial sign for the bench I chose, and I gave a hearty "Amen" as I collapsed onto it.




It wasn't far to go now. (The OS app said 5 miles, but what did it know.) Over Belper Bridge, past the imposing brick block of East Mill, and back onto the A6 at The Triangle. I poked my nose into Christ Church, which was full of colour and smelled of incense.




Then I walked up Long Row, built to house millworkers, and had a look at the Unitarian Chapel, erected by Jedediah Strutt, the patriarch of the mill-building Strutt family. I went through Belper Memorial Gardens and crossed the busy A609 to return to the Coppice car park, where my sun-heated car awaited me.






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

A mini-pilgrimage to Derby Cathedral

On a sunny day near the end of June, I set out to walk from my village of Findern to Derby Cathedral. If this had been 1826 or even 1926, this would have been a perfectly normal activity. In 2026, no one spends two hours walking to the nearest city. They drive, or catch a bus. It feels faintly subversive to ignore the more obvious modes of transport and to set off on foot. Priory Way, the footpath north out of Findern, is on the Six-Inch series of OS maps from the late 1800s. It has probably not changed much, give or take a few electrical pylons. The fields and farms are still there. Butterflies flew over bright yellow flowers of lady's bedstraw; a hare paused to look at me; a squirrel panicked and almost ran over my toes. After a few miles I came out at Heatherton Pond, greeting its more manicured path with relief. This is now the edge of Derby city; the boundary runs just south of the lake. However, I was surprised at how much more green space I encountered. A cycle path took me ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sheffield Cathedral: dogs and lions welcome

Earlier in the day I had caught the train up from Derby and visited Rotherham Minster . The Supertram from Rotherham brought me to Sheffield Cathedral just as the clock struck two. I realised as I left the tram that I had totally forgotten my cathedral passport until now. Rotherham may not have had a stamp anyway, though I probably could have got the vicar's signature or something, but I dug the passport out of my bag to be sure to remember it. The shop had a stamp, I was told, and so it did. Formalities completed, I went to explore Sheffield Cathedral. It's a strange jumble of a building; "one of those forever unfinished places" as an architectural journal  describes it. This view along the church towards the east end makes it look pretty standard - a medieval chancel and a Victorian-renovated nave. But if you turn ninety degrees to the north, there is another long axis - a regimental chapel that leads through to the Chapel of the Holy Spirit. At one point in the 193...
Post a Comment
Read more