Miller’s Dale for Tidewell

THE TWELVE STONE DWELLING-PLACES known as Ravensdale Cottages were built in 1823 as two rows of six facing one another across a small terrace. They sit in a sheltered valley with a picturesque view of the tree-lined slopes that flank this gorge. To reach them, you drive along an impossibly skinny cartlane until you despair of seeing civilization; then you park as the cottages come into view. But you have to walk to the brink of the terrace to get a full dose of the charm of the place.

Ravensdale Cottages

They’re now holiday retreats, or possibly domiciles for the truly anti-social. True, you’re cheek-to-jowl with adjacent neighbors, but it strikes me as a place where you can count on being ignored or otherwise left alone. Our friend Moz has a connection here: a good friend of his spends summer in one of the cottages. His attempts to reach the fellow by phone were fruitless, but (as we learned) cell service there is variable. And so our long drive through the Peak District brought us here, Mohammed again skillfully piloting us. Moz phoned again; no answer. We parked in a small lot near the terrace and walked to the houses. Not surprisingly, there was no response when Moz knocked on the door. We were left simply to enjoy the peaceful surrounding on a pleasant summer day, looking at the craggy cliffside that drops from the Derbyshire Dales National Nature Reserve, dreaming of the comfortable retreat any one of these cottages would provide.

South of the cottages, three-quarters of a mile away, is a condominium complex called Wye Mill, constructed in the remains of the Cressbrook Mill complex. In his book “The Road to Little Dribbling,” a witty jaunt up the more-or-less center of England, Bill Bryson passed through the Peak District and commended a view, “Not far from Monsal Dale ... where the trail emerges from a long tunnel into a green valley. Holding a commanding position at the valley head is a white Georgian building that looks at first sight like a stately home. In fact, it is Cressbrook Mill, built by Richard Arkwright in 1779 (and rebuilt six years later after a fire) to spin cotton. It is quite the most handsome factory you will ever see and possibly the most important, for it changed the world. Along with Cromford Mill, built a few miles away near Matlock, this was where the factory system started.” Arkwright chose the location both for its abundant machine-powering water and “because the remote location made it less likely that they would be besieged by angry spinners put out of work by his new methods. It also made it easier for him to exploit his workers. Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.”

A local man named William Newton spearheaded the new construction, adding apprentices cottages to house those orphans – or at least the ones who survived. And he built the Ravensdale Cottages. A Peak District National Park Authority Conservation Area Appraisal from 2011 describes them thus:

Typical architectural characteristics are diamond paned metal windows and decorative bargeboards. All properties are constructed of limestone with gritstone dressings to windows and door surrounds. Blue slate roofs and Staffordshire blue tile roofs are typical, as are limestone boundary walls with triangular coping stones.

Which means that we got to enjoy the sight of a set of small, historically informed cottages set in one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying a lot, because the Peak District offers one this-must-be-a-painting landscape after another.

Ravensdale Cottages are in (or near, I can’t work out the village designations around here) a town called Millers Dale, and Moz made sure I saw the roadside sign indicating that we also were near Tideswell. Because he knew I’d understand this very rarefied reference. It’s to a song by Flanders & Swann, one I have performed only infrequently because it’s a collection of British railway-station names. Very evocative names, that is, but only to a British resident of a certain age, because it laments the service changes instituted by onetime British Railway chair Richard Beeching in the 1960s. The long list begins with “Millers Dale for Tideswell,” saluting a station built in 1863 and closed 104 years later.

Our day began with a visit to Moz’s childhood neighborhood, an area of Manchester called Gorton. He asked Mohammed to stop near a particular street and told us the following story:

This is Greenlea Avenue. That flat there, the first one – the upstairs flat – that was ours. That's the one my mother got when she brought us from Lancaster. She lived with her parents for a while in that tiny cottage you just saw a picture of, and then she took us down to the Town Hall and she sat us down on the counter and says, “I'm not moving from here till you give me a house, a place to live.” So that's what we got. We were there all during the war.

One day we’re playing out there, and this Army lorry pulls up here, right where you are now. And the kids ran across and I heard someone say, “Hey, it’s Pat Walsh’s dad!” So I thought, “If it’s something to do with Pat Walsh, my brother, then it’s something to do with me.” I ran out to them. And a guy jumped out of the back of the lorry and they threw two kit bags after him. All us kids were standing around, looking. He didn’t look at us! He just said, “Right lads – be off!” And he picked up his kit bags, and he walked across this road here, up there to that path, up that path and at that door, where my mother was standing. And he went in our house! We’d never had a man in our house! He went in our house and they shut the door. Left us standing there! And that was how I met my father.

Our first stop in the Peak District was the village of Eyam (pronounced “eem”). To call it charming is only to acknowledge that it shares the same lovely aspect as all the other villages we saw in the area. Moz knew where he was taking us, and I understood in hindsight that he mercifully wanted to numb us a little before the next stage of the adventure. So we stopped for a pint at the Miners Arms.

Plague Victims Register

But Eyam has a tragic history. In the summer of 1665, a package arrived for George Viccars, a tailor. It was a parcel of cloth pieces, sent from London, and snuggled into the package were fleas. Not an uncommon hitchhiker back then, but these fleas were infected with bubonic plague. By the time Viccars had succumbed and died, the disease already had spread, first throughout his household, then throughout the town.

The World Health Organization describes its progress thus: “Plague bacillus, Y. pestis, enters at the bite and travels through the lymphatic system to the nearest lymph node where it replicates itself. The lymph node then becomes inflamed, tense and painful, and is called a ‘bubo.’”

Eyam thus gained the distinction of being the only place in England outside of London to be hit by the plague. But that’s due to a large extent by the actions of the town’s two men of the cloth (if I may put it that way). One of them, Thomas Stanley, something of a pariah for refusing to take the Oath of Conformity; the other was his successor, William Mompesson. Together they came up with the scheme that probably saved nearby Sheffield and other cities and towns from devastation. They set up a quarantine line, which nobody was allowed to cross in either direction. Food and other essentials came from nearby villages, left at one of those boundaries, paid for with money placed in troughs filled with vinegar.

During the fourteen months that the disease rampaged through the town, over 260 of Eyam’s 350 residents died of it. Another disease-thwarting measure was to bury those victims as quickly as possible, near to wherever they died. The church itself was locked, and services were held in the open air. Sound familiar?

Buxton Opera House

We visited the Eyam Parish Church, which sports an 8th-century Celtic cross in its graveyard. Inside, a register lists the names of the victims, across the sanctuary from a stained-glass window display installed in 1985 that illustrates the story of this plague visitation.

Clearly, another pint was needed, and this we enjoyed at the Old Clubhouse, a pub across the street from the Buxton Opera House, an ornate Edwardian theater where a Gilbert and Sullivan Festival was underway. It was the festival’s first year back since 2013, but we hadn’t planned far enough ahead to see any of it. Buxton is a spa town that boasts thermal springs – not unlike the near-to-me city of Saratoga Springs, but without the horses and horse’s asses that horseracing brings.

How to finish our last full day in the Manchester area? Moz had that well in mind. “Fish and chips in the car,” he insisted. We parked near the Heaton Moor Fish Bar, in Stockport, and he and Susan returned with hot, greasy packages of goodies. By this point, I’d enjoyed many a similar order at many a pub, but dining in the car is wonderfully reminiscent of the road trips where such a meal becomes part of the landscape.

The next day would take us to Edinburgh, and that will be described in a subsequent essay.