Peak District Moors

A History of the Peak District Moors David Hey

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Contents

Preface �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� vii Chapter 1 Introduction: The Longshaw Estate ��������������������������� 1 The meaning of ‘moor’........................................................................ 1 Longshaw over the centuries................................................................ 2 Roads................................................................................................ 11 The enclosure of the commons and wastes......................................... 14 The right to roam and the sale of the Longshaw Estate....................... 18 Chapter 2 The Early History of the Moors ���������������������������������23 The Stone Age................................................................................... 23 The Bronze Age................................................................................. 26 The Iron Age..................................................................................... 35 Romans, Angles and Vikings............................................................... 38 Chapter 3 The Middle Ages ���������������������������������������������������������45 Forests, chases and lordships.............................................................. 45 The Royal Forest of the Peak.......................................................... 45 Other forests.................................................................................. 49 Hallamshire................................................................................... 52 Wharncliffe Chase......................................................................... 54 The northern moors....................................................................... 56 Monastic granges............................................................................... 61 Townships and hamlets...................................................................... 67 Saltways............................................................................................ 72 Moorland industries........................................................................... 75 Chapter 4 ‘A waste and houling wilderness’ 1550–1750 �������������76 The nature of the moors..................................................................... 76 Moorland farms................................................................................. 79

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Rights and stints................................................................................ 83 Peat................................................................................................... 87 Early enclosure of the commons......................................................... 90 Greens and small commons................................................................ 93 Woods............................................................................................... 94 Industries.......................................................................................... 96 Communications...............................................................................102 The growing economy.......................................................................105 Chapter 5 Improvement and Enclosure �����������������������������������108 Turnpike roads..................................................................................108 Canals and railways...........................................................................114 Farming before enclosure..................................................................116 Boundaries before enclosure..............................................................119 Parliamentary enclosure....................................................................121 Victorian moorland halls, farmsteads and new settlements.................129 Reservoirs.........................................................................................133 Chapter 6 Grouse Moors ������������������������������������������������������������138 The early history of grouse-shooting.................................................138 Managed moors................................................................................142 Stanage moors..................................................................................147 Shooting only...................................................................................150 The Harpur-Crewe moors.................................................................152 Modern times...................................................................................155 Chapter 7 The Right to Roam ���������������������������������������������������157 The first rambling clubs....................................................................157 The Peak District and Northern Counties Footpaths Preservation Society..........................................................................................159 G.H.B. Ward and the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers..............................161 Kinder Scout and the legend of the mass trespass..............................171 The continued struggle for access......................................................178 The Second World War and its aftermath .........................................180 Chapter 8

Conclusion: Present Times ��������������������������������������185

Bibliography �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������192 Index ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������196

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Preface

I

have lived on the edge of the Peak District for most of my life and walking across the moors remains my chief recreation. I spent my childhood in the hamlet of Catshaw and my youth 2 or 3 miles further down the Upper Don Valley at Penistone. As a student I got to know the Staffordshire Moorlands and as a young teacher the moors around Holmfirth. For the past forty years I’ve lived at Dronfield Woodhouse, ten minutes away from Longshaw. I’m a past president of the South Yorkshire and North-East Derbyshire Area of the Ramblers’ Association and I’m a local historian who has spent much of his professional life researching the history of this area in the national and local archives. I’ve been very fortunate in having had the opportunity to combine my job with my hobby. This book is aimed in particular at the sort of people who realise that the enjoyment of a good walk in beautiful surroundings is enhanced by a knowledge of how that environment has come to be what it is today.

The book covers all periods of time from prehistory to the present. A typical moorland walk might take in the standing stones of a prehistoric stone circle, a medieval boundary marker, a guide stoop dated 1709, the straight walls of nineteenth-century enclosure, a row of Victorian grouse butts, a long line of flagstones brought in by helicopter, and very much more besides. Some of this physical evidence remains puzzling, but most of it can be explained by assiduous research in local record offices. I have not referenced the documents, as that would have made the book twice as long, but the bibliography provides leads to where the information may be found.

For instance, I have written a fully referenced article, ‘Kinder Scout and the Legend of the Mass Trespass’ in The Agricultural History Review, vol. 59, part II (2011), pp. 199–216. I would be pleased to respond to enquiries as to where particular documentary evidence may be seen.

The friends who have helped me over the years are far too numerous to list, but the bibliography gives an indication of publications I have found particularly rewarding. Local history is a joint venture where we can all

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viii A History of the Peak District Moors

make a contribution. The pleasure derived from it is greatly enhanced by what Bert Ward, the great pioneer of rambling in the Peak District, called ‘the trinity of legs, eyes and mind’.

David Hey April 2013

For Richard, Dan and Matt, moorland ramblers

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Chapter 2

The Early History of the Moors

The Stone Age

B

otanists have used the technique of pollen analysis, correlated with radio-carbon dating, to show that at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, the present moors of northern England looked very different from what they do now. As the ice retreated, the climate grew rapidly warmer and soon reached temperatures similar to those of today.

Dwarf birch, juniper, thrift and buttercup covered the thin soils of the landscape. Then in the Mesolithic era (or Middle Stone Age) this mosaic was gradually replaced by wildwood, right up to the highest summits of the Pennines. Pollen samples from Cook’s Study, at the head of the Holme Valley, 1,472 feet above sea level, indicate that the forest cover there consisted mainly of hazel, oak and alder with some birch and lime. Elsewhere in the Peak District, woodland in the valley bottoms was dominated by alder and possibly ash: the lower valley sides were covered by pine, oak and elm; and the upper valley sides and the lower summits were characterised by birch, hazel scrub and montane plant species. Within this broad picture, however, many exposed summits, cliffs, screes, areas of shallow soil, mires, springs and flushes had no tree cover.

Over a very long period of time, the soils in the upper areas became wet and acidic and so the vegetation gradually changed to hazel scrub, birch and willow. It seems likely that fire – whether natural or man-made – was also responsible for some of the long-term changes that produced the present moorland landscape. Peat began to form in basins with large catchments of water at the highest levels and as the rainfall increased blanket peat began to spread outwards in a process that started in later Mesolithic times, continued until the end of the Iron Age and, in some places, even later.

The Mesolithic era is defined loosely as the period from around 8000 bc to about 4500 bc, when the total population of Britain was only a few thousand.

The people of that time lived in small groups in every type of countryside

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The uninviting nature of much of the Kinder plateau is apparent from this view of exposed peat on the summit. Peat began to spread in the Stone Age, but the present landscape was thousands of years in the making.

but they left little mark on the landscape. Their distinctive tools and flakes, shaped from brown flints and black chert and secured to wooden or bone shafts with birch pitch for use as arrows, spears, harpoons, knives and edgetools, have been found at what may have been their summer camps and perhaps a few more permanent settlements. Most of the flints and flakes that have been collected from the Peak District moors were preserved in sandy soils beneath a later covering of peat on the edges of gently eroded scarp slopes. Erosion has brought them to light. These uplands, rising from 1,200 to 1,600 feet, remained well-wooded, with patches of grassland or heath. A good example is the Harry Hut site on Chunal Moor, near Charlesworth, which seems to have been occupied from time-to-time between the sixth and fourth millennium bc.

Amateur collectors with a strong interest in prehistory have been particularly active in discovering evidence for Mesolithic activity on the Meltham and Marsden Moors, high above the Colne Valley. Sites include Warcock Hill, Cupwith Hill, Flint Hill, March Hill, Pule Hill and White Hill, all of which were close to passes that followed the contours of the land and probably used by hunting parties in the summer months. Several thousand

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The Early History of the Moors 25

pieces of flint, many of them shaped into tools, have been unearthed at Cupwith Hill, while four distinct workshop sites, which together produced over 6,000 flints, including 500 worked tools, have been identified at March Hill. Fewer sites have been discovered south-west of Meltham, but at West Nab, 1,641 feet above sea level, excavators found about 350 flints, including a number of cores, microliths, and worked and used pieces. Surface finds indicate other Mesolithic sites on the moors between Hepworth and Thurlstone and near Dunford Bridge, on elevated spurs and scarp edges close to abundant small streams and well-defined ridges. An excavated site at Cook’s Study, situated on a gritstone-capped spur, produced numerous microliths, scrapers and gravers from the late Mesolithic era, when what is now bare moorland was still well-wooded and full of game.

Flint tools and weapons are almost the only evidence that Mesolithic people have left on the local moors. Many of their artefacts were made from wood, bone and skin and have not survived, and most of their dwellings must have been temporary or movable structures. A more permanent dwelling in which a family could have lived during the winter months was excavated in the early 1960s near the former Deepcar railway station in the valley of the Little Don, just off the moors, but this was an exceptional discovery that attracted widespread interest among prehistorians. The fauna of this era included red and roe deer, large wild cattle known as aurochs, wild boars, wolves and bears, and small mammals such as the fox, badger, wild cat, otter and beaver. Mesolithic people have been traditionally regarded as huntergatherers who followed a seasonal round, but prehistorians now place less emphasis on their hunting and fishing and more on their gathering of the abundant and varied plant foods that were available.

The New Stone Age or Neolithic era, dating from about 4500 to 2200 bc, saw the beginnings of settled farming, a practice that spread slowly across Europe from the Middle East. At Lismore Fields, at the start of the climb on to the moors above Buxton, an excavation in the mid-1980s led by Daryl Garton revealed the best-preserved evidence that has so far been discovered in Britain for well-built, rectangular, timber-framed buildings with central hearths that date back to the Early Neolithic period. Nothing survives above ground-level, but radiocarbon tests on material found in the postholes suggest a date of around 3500 bc. A few flints and flakes showed that Lismore Fields had been used in a different way even earlier, in the Mesolithic era.

The site was occupied over an unusually long time, though continuous use cannot be proved. The Neolithic finds include pottery, a polished stone axe,

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flint and chert tools, and numerous charred cereal grains, hazelnuts and the fruit and seeds of crab apples. But the acidity of the clay soils has destroyed any bones of domesticated livestock or wild animals that might have been hunted. Several pits and nine small circular structures of unknown purpose and date were also found nearby. This is an archaeological site of national importance.

The Neolithic era was the time when trees began to be felled and the first major monuments in the form of henges and chambered barrows appeared on the limestone plateau of the White Peak. The present moorland landscapes around the White Peak were peripheral areas that were grazed on a smaller scale. Only a few Neolithic axes have been found there. The pollen record for the Eastern Moors shows that up to 3000 bc mixed oak forest, with a lot of alder in the wetter parts, had replaced earlier pine trees and that the forest cover was almost complete. Scatters of Neolithic potsherds and flint and chert tools have been found on the moors above the Upper Derwent Valley, but the earliest surviving earthworks are the burial mounds known as barrows, which were sited in prominent positions in the landscape during the later Neolithic period and beyond.

The Bronze Age Human settlement on some of the present gritstone moors began in earnest in the Late Neolithic era and the Early Bronze Age. The moors to the east of the River Derwent, stretching from Bamford in the north to Beeley in the south, have provided some of England’s most important archaeological evidence for this period. Further north and west, however, the higher parts of the Dark Peak are bleak and windswept, and only a small number of isolated round barrows have been found there; perhaps there is more to be found under the later layers of peat? Evidence of Bronze Age activities was preserved on suitable sites to the east of the river once the peat began to spread, even though the cultivation of crops was abandoned and the whole area was given over to grazing. The surviving features in the landscape are not easy to recognise when the heather is high, but controlled or accidental burning sometimes exposes the foundations of abandoned roundhouses within low, irregular field walls. More evident are the stone-clearance cairns, round barrows and small stone circles, which together demonstrate the extensive use of the landscape in this early period.

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