CHATSWORTH, EYAM AND CASTLETON

The past week has been a hectic one. Having returned from Venice, I developed a viral infection which kept me in and out of bed for several days. Having spent Saturday afternoon at the village fete (see last posting), this bug just got worse. It’s been over a week now and I’m only just starting to recover. Now of course, Barbara has got it but at least she had the sense to go to the doctor and get some penicillin pills.
Last Tuesday, regardless of viral infections we set out for the village of Eyam (pron Eem) in Derbyshire. If you’ve ever read a book called A Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brookes, you’ll know about Eyam. It is famous as the “plague village”.
We’d booked a night at a B and B and set out on a hundred mile drive into the beautiful Peak District of Derbyshire.
About half an hour before we reached our goal we rounded a bend to be surprised by another great English House, the seat of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Chatsworth.
We spend a few hours wandering through great halls and reception rooms and glorious gardens. The place was built in the 1550’s and boasts an amazing collection collection of art and sculpture which has been added to over the centuries. I’ve included some samples here.
We reached Eyam itself late in the afternoon and checked into a cosy room above the Eyam Tea Rooms. As this is a pretty small village of stone cottages and houses, we set out to find a few of the plague landmarks. Read the book if you are interested in the bigger picture. Briefly this is the story. In 1665, the village tailor received a parcel of cloth from London. It was damp and the tailor’s wife asked his assistant George Viccars to dry it in front of the fire. He did and thereby released plague infested fleas. A few days later George was dead of a raging fever and terrible sores. Over the next 14 months 260 villagers died of plague. It would have been far worse except that the village rector William Mompesson persuaded the villagers to quarantine themselves from the outside world, thus stopping the spread to the whole region. He organised food to be left by a border stone outside the village, and you can still see it, with holes where money to pay for food was left in vinegar, to stop the spread of germs. Many of the houses are marked as plague houses where whole families perished. And their graves still stand in fields outside the village. William Mompesson’s wife Catherine is also buried in Eyam. There is a place called the Cucklett Church in the Delf, the Delf being a deep valley with an arching open cave half way down. This is where they held open air church services, because people wouldn’t get too close to their fellows lest they catch the pestilence.
All of this Barbara and I explored in what we thought was our limited time in Eyam. Then I drove the car down a lane which ended in a narrow track going nowhere. In reversing back up the track I managed to burn out the clutch. The end result was a one night stay became a three night stay.
People were very helpful however, and despite our raging colds, we managed to do more sightseeing, and the man from the B and B drove us to another village called Castleton, where there is an old castle (Peveril),built in 1086,and huge caverns where they one mined lead. The scenery too was spectacular, with very steep green covered dales and peaks, and dark leafy forests. They also mined a beautiful crystalline rock called Blue John. It’s almost like opal but mainly blue and yellow in colour, hence the name, which comes from the French Bleu/Jaune.
Finally on Friday, our car was ready to collect, and we had an uneventful drive home. Today we are both trying to recover from this bug before we set off for Budapest on Wednesday.