Attraction in East Midlands

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.

Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire is one of the most extraordinary houses in England, a building so ahead of its time and so boldly conceived that it has never quite stopped astonishing visitors in the four centuries since its construction. Built between 1590 and 1597 for Elizabeth Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick, the hall was a deliberate statement of power and cultural ambition from one of the most remarkable women of the Elizabethan age. Bess was born into relatively modest gentry in 1527 and through four strategic marriages accumulated a fortune that placed her second only to Queen Elizabeth I in wealth among the women of England. By the time she commissioned Hardwick Hall she was in her sixties and at the very peak of her influence, and the building she created reflects that confidence completely. Her initials ES, for Elizabeth Shrewsbury, are worked into the roofline in elaborate stone lettering so large they can be read from a considerable distance, an unmistakable declaration of ownership and ambition. The hall is most celebrated architecturally for its extraordinary expanse of windows, which led to the contemporary rhyme "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall." At a time when glass was enormously expensive, the facades of Hardwick Hall are filled with it from ground to roof in a way that was genuinely unprecedented in English architecture. The windows flood the interiors with natural light and create a visual drama on the facade that looks almost modern in its transparency. Robert Smythson, who may have contributed to the design alongside Bess herself, created a building that pushed the technical boundaries of Elizabethan construction. The interiors are equally remarkable. Hardwick preserves one of the finest collections of Elizabethan textiles in existence, including tapestries, embroideries and needlework that Bess spent decades accumulating. Many pieces were worked by hand by Bess and her companions, including the captive Mary Queen of Scots, who spent years under Bess's guardianship at nearby Chatsworth. The Great High Chamber and the Long Gallery are among the grandest surviving Elizabethan rooms in England, their original furnishings still largely in place. The estate surrounding the hall includes a walled garden, an orchard and a deer park, as well as the ruins of the earlier Old Hardwick Hall that Bess had inhabited before commissioning this grander replacement. The contrast between the ruins of the old hall and the magnificence of the new one says everything about the ambition that drove this remarkable woman. Hardwick Old Hall is managed separately by English Heritage and stands close enough to view clearly from the gardens. Hardwick Hall is now in the care of the National Trust and is open to visitors throughout the year. The combination of exceptional architecture, extraordinary textiles, strong historical narrative and beautiful Derbyshire countryside makes it one of the most rewarding historic house visits in the country.

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.

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.

Arbor Low in the limestone country of the Derbyshire Peak District is the most significant Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial monument in the English Midlands, a henge monument of approximately 2500 BC consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a central plateau on which approximately fifty limestone slabs lie recumbent, the stones having fallen or been deliberately laid flat at some point in their history in a departure from the upright arrangement typical of most British stone circles. The site commands extensive views over the limestone plateau and its elevated position above the valley below makes its role as a ceremonial gathering place immediately comprehensible. The monument consists of a great circular bank reaching approximately two metres in height with a ditch inside it and two opposing entrances, enclosing an area of approximately fifty metres diameter. The recumbent stones inside the enclosure were originally upright and the reasons for their current position remain unclear, though it seems likely that many were toppled deliberately rather than simply falling under their own weight. The interpretation of Arbor Low must acknowledge this uncertainty while appreciating the monument's scale and its position in the landscape. The nearby bowl barrow of Gib Hill, visible from Arbor Low and connected to it by a linear earthwork, is one of the largest prehistoric barrows in the Peak District and was built adjacent to the henge in a relationship that suggests the two monuments were conceived as parts of a single ceremonial complex. The combination of Arbor Low and Gib Hill makes this one of the most significant prehistoric landscape settings in the English Midlands.