A surprise sprinking of snow......

.........over Greenoak Park from our window this morning. St George's Farm (where Ruskin set up some squabbling bootmakers to grow fruit) winks from its hill.

Later we take the chesty car up to Dick's garage at Dore. We walk the old coffin route alongside the trickle of the Bushey - an old path which I am sure many residents don't even know about as it is hidden away between two suburban streets - Busheywood Road and Devonshire Road. The robins sing wistfully.

Here's another old Derbyshire squeezer stile at the end near Tesco Express.....

I truly hate Tesco's.

Across the Baslow Road and up a very slippery bank past the flats and up stone steps onto the top of Prospect Road, Woodland Place and Queen Victoria Road. The view across to Houndkirk Moors sparkles this morning:

Back down Queen Victoria Road and I take a picture of Woodland Villas which I recently discovered by a process of deduction was briefly lived in by Edward Carpenter, the gay Victorian radical and simple-lifer (recent fascinating biography written by Sheila Rowbotham). He wrote to Walt Whitman from here, describing the view.

At the bottom of the road I suddenly notice (and how many times have I walked past here?) the old grindstones set each side of the driveway of the flats on the corner of Queen Victoria Road and Mickley Lane. Perhaps there were grinders on the Totley Brook here? Certainly George Hukin, Carpenter's friend and unrequited love lived a few yards from here and was a razor grinder.

New Year, new blog

A frosty start to my New Year's resolution to keep track of my patch. Up the White Lane with Maisie to Woodthorpe where snags of sheep fleece on the fences are laced with rime. The snapping cold sits sharp in my chest. Whitened pines at the top are like the ornaments on Christmas cakes. Everything has become faery and the air is so still, almost palpable. Bass hum of the traffic on Baslow Road, distant cronk of ravens.

Then along Fanshawegate Lane to the Hall where I hoped to meet the owners to ask about its history, but no such luck. I recently discovered that George Adams, the socialist sandalmaker and erstwhile friend of Edward Carpenter was living here in 1901 and drew it for the republished journal of Lady Anne Fanshawe. Lady Anne was the stimulus for the recent Channel 4 drama about the Civil War - The Devil's Whore.

On Boxing Day, I found another of the houses Adams lived in with his wife Lucy after he fell out with Carpenter - Adamfield on Fox Lane. I'm rapidly becoming an expert (bore?) on the obscurer reaches of North Derbyshire socialist history....