Attraction in Derbyshire

Chatsworth House in the Peak District of Derbyshire is one of the greatest country houses in England, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Devonshire for over four centuries and a house of such extraordinary quality in its architecture, collections and landscape setting that it is frequently described as the Palace of the Peak. The house stands in the valley of the Derwent River in Derbyshire below the eastern edge of the Peak District National Park and its combination of baroque and later classical facades, the magnificent park landscaped by Capability Brown, and the extraordinary collections of art assembled across five centuries of ducal patronage creates an experience of country house visiting that is without equal in the north of England. The current house was largely rebuilt in the baroque style for the first Duke of Devonshire between 1686 and 1707, producing the south and east fronts that define the character of the house seen from the park. The north wing was added by William Kent in the 1750s and the entire house was extended and remodelled in the early nineteenth century by the sixth Duke under the direction of the architect Jeffry Wyatville, who added the north wing and gave the house the extra length that today makes it one of the most extensive country houses in Britain. The interior collections assembled by successive Dukes of Devonshire are of museum quality. The house contains magnificent paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Veronese and Reynolds; an exceptional collection of drawings including works by Raphael and Holbein; and a library of outstanding importance. The decorative arts, furniture, silver and porcelain collections are of comparable quality and the state rooms in which they are displayed represent some of the finest baroque and neoclassical interiors in England. The garden at Chatsworth, combining the formal cascade with the Emperor Fountain, the great rock garden and the working kitchen garden, is one of the most famous in England, and the surrounding parkland with its farmland, woodland and the views to the Peak District moors provide an outstanding setting.

Cromford Mill near Matlock in Derbyshire is the world's first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill, built by Richard Arkwright in 1771 as the prototype for the factory system that would transform the global economy and create the Industrial Revolution. The mill is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Derwent Valley Mills complex and provides the most direct connection available anywhere in the world to the moment when machine production in purpose-built factories replaced the domestic cottage industry system that had organised manufacturing since prehistory. Arkwright's achievement at Cromford was not simply mechanical but organisational and social. He created not only the water frame spinning machine but the complete factory system in which workers came to a single workplace, worked set hours under supervision and were paid wages for their labour. The village of Cromford that he built around the mill, the workers' housing, the market place and the mill pond system that drove the waterwheel, all survive in remarkable completeness as evidence of the complete social and industrial vision that Arkwright implemented here. The Arkwright Society manages the site and the programme of restoration ongoing since the 1970s has brought significant sections of the mill complex back into interpretable condition. The adjacent Masson Mill, Arkwright's later and more impressive building, provides complementary industrial heritage, and the Cromford Canal and the High Peak Trail provide excellent outdoor access to the surrounding Derbyshire landscape.

The Nine Ladies Stone Circle on Stanton Moor in the Derbyshire Peak District is a small but evocative Bronze Age monument of approximately 3,500 years ago, a ring of nine slender millstone grit standing stones each less than a metre high set on the high moorland of the moor in an open landscape of heather and bilberry that has preserved the circle's setting with unusual completeness. The circle is one of numerous prehistoric monuments on Stanton Moor, a flat-topped sandstone plateau that served as an important ceremonial landscape during the Bronze Age and whose concentration of burial cairns, standing stones and the circle itself makes it the most significant prehistoric site in the Peak District. The name Nine Ladies derives from the Christian-era legend that the stones are women turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath, a tradition common across Britain that was applied to many prehistoric stone circles as an explanatory myth for monuments whose original purpose was no longer understood. A single outlying stone, the King Stone, stands a short distance from the circle and represents the musician whose playing caused the women's transgression, completing the narrative. The circle sits within a heather moorland managed for grouse that provides a characteristic upland Derbyshire setting, the views from the moor extending across the Derwent Valley below to the White Peak limestone country beyond. The walk to the circle from the car park at Birchover is straightforward and takes approximately twenty minutes through pleasant moorland scenery. The wider Stanton Moor landscape, with its more than seventy recorded Bronze Age monuments concentrated in a relatively small area, represents one of the most intensively used ceremonial landscapes of the period in the British Isles and rewards extended exploration beyond the circle itself.