52° 56’ 34.09” N
1° 28’ 34.51” W
elev. 52m
Field Report
I would like to persuade you that one day I jumped in my
car, drove down the A38, stopping off at any place that took my fancy, to
shoot artful images with SLR and camcorder, then penned a pithy travelogue on the
back of napkins in disregarded transport caffs and Little Chefs.
But I didn't.
This is not the record one journey, but fragments of many. The first began before
I even stepped outside. Invented on Google maps and Streetview, honed though OS
Getamap and SABRE's online archive of historical road maps, peppered with
quirky facts and fatuous snippets gleaned from Wikipedia, English Heritage, Hoskins and Pevsner - it seemed a perfectly designed journey, each location selected
carefully to illuminate a particular theme: heritage and anti-heritage, the
natural landscape and the constructed one. This beautiful plan, recorded
painstakingly on a spreadsheet, colour coded, that linked each theme to a particular sonnet form - Petrarchan, English, Spencerian, terza rima... everything worked
perfectly until I left the house; then awkwardly actuality intervened, and my
perfectly planned journey became the road not taken.
My 'less travelled' road began at Darley Abbey on a
sunny but cold day in the odd dead time that follows New Year's day. Since I had not yet thought of how I might record my A38 trip, I used a pre-existing travel blog - 'Heels for Dust' - looking back at the entry now, the demise
of my planned 'travelogue' seems a foregone conclusuion, but it began brightly enough:
Darley Abbey is on the northern outskirts of Derby,
tucked away just off the A6 by the river. Although the mill complex and village
are of significant historical importance
the place is refreshingly undeveloped in terms of tourism. It seeems a real
attempt is being made to house small businesses within the mills and the Darley
Abbey Society is active locally to promote appropriate development and
community activities. Of course the attractive Regency vernacular architecture
has resulted in gentrification, but at least this seems preferable to turning
the entire complex into edutainment or a designer shopping mall, which is the
fate of Masson Mills at Cromford at the northern end of the World Heritage
site.
Almost as soon as my journey began, I became sceptical
about the entire notion of 'heritage'.
We drove home to Buxton along the A6 through Belper to Cromford, also
places with significant collections of early industrial buildings and included
in the Derwent Valley Mills heritage site. The choice of sites does seem a
little arbitary. Blenhiem Palace is listed, but Chatsworth is not. The
Pontcysyllte Aqueduct near Llangollen is listed as a masterpiece of
canal engineering - but is it more significant than the Cheshire Ring? Who
chooses and why?
Furthermore, on the ground, ignoring the carping of strategically placed information boards, the mundane often seemed more interesting and exotic than places and artefacts canonised by UNESCO. I found a late 1960's bungalow as interesting
as the 'heritage' buildings. The area was designated a conservation area in
1970, so this could be one of the last 'unplanned' buildings erected.
voceti: Board A: The Evan's Legacy - The Mills.
voceti: Board A: The Evan's Legacy - The Mills.
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