Walking a ghost ………… looking for lost railway stations

Hindlow, Hurdlow, Parsley Hay, and Alsop en le Dale are names that call up images of a sleepy rural past.

Along the route, 2019

And once along time ago they were just a train ride away.

Encountering others, 2019

I should know, because yesterday we visited them, along with Hartington, Tissington, and Thorpe Cloud.

One is a collection of eight homes although it does have its own Norman church.

Another has the pub, while the last we encountered still has a fine stately home, built in the 17th century and owned by a family who may have come over with the Conqueror.

What they all have in common was a railway line, built in the last decade of the 19th century, connecting Buxton to Ashbourne.

The wonder is that it was ever built, because this bit of the Peak District was sparsely populated and remained so.

But the line was a lifeline and at its peak six trains a day ran from Buxton to Ashbourne, carrying passengers, minerals, milk and farm produce.

And in the winter it offered a vital link for the villages and hamlets along the way who might other wise struggle when the snow fell.

As far as you can see, 2019

In 1901 one train which was derailed, remained marooned for three days after a heavy snow storm blocked the line, leaving the crew to be fed by local farmers.

But rail closures are, and were no respecter of communities and ours closed to passengers in 1954, although special excursions were still allowed until 1963, but after that there were no more.

Finally, the line was bought by the County Council and has become a route for walkers and cyclists, commanding fine views across the fields and once past the busy roads, you are plunged into a silent place, interrupted only by the sound of birds.

The route runs through old cuttings, where the trees and the high rock sides seal you in, while at other points the old track is carried on an embankment which offers up perfect views for miles.

And along the way, there can still be found relics of its old railway past, from level markers denoting the gradient to obscure bits of concrete whose function is lost but which will once have done the business of keeping the trains running.

Alsop en le Dale railway station, circa 1959s

It is easy to get lost in what there is, which at one point included a bunch of stray sheep which had escaped from a neigbouring field, but for me it was the tracks railway past, now just a paragraph in a tourist guide, with one of those faded and slightly blurred old pictures which mean little unless like us you have done that walk.

Location; Derbyshire

Pictures; the Tissington Trail, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Alsop en le Dale, railway Station, from the collection of J.Wallace Sutherland of Davenport, http://sutherland.davenportstation.org.uk/aaprint/man.html#70-01

Alsop en le dene …………… looking for stories

Some places don’t change over much across the centuries.

Alsop en le dene in Derbyshire, is one of them.

It is a hamlet of just eight homes, and while it can boast a Norman church, it has no pub and has lost its post office.

And you might well drive through it without giving it a second glance, and that would be a shame because there has been a settlement here from before the Doomsday Book.

And as you do, I have been drawn to digging into its past, for no particular reason other than I can and of course that on going fascination for those small rural communities on the edge of bigger things at a time when Britain was going through the Industrial Revolution.

As ever the starting point are the eight census returns from 1841to 1921, along with the parish records.

Together they offer up a wealth of information about the families of Alsop en len dene, from their occupations, places of birth to the age distribution of the community and along the way reveal a few secrets of the lives behind the doors.

For me it is one of those interesting comparisons with Chorlton-cum-Hardy which in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was still a small rural community just 4½ miles from Manchester.

Of course, Alsop en len dene was much smaller, consisting of just forty-six people compared to Chorlton’s 750 inhabitants, and there are other differences.

The vast majority of those engaged in farming in Chorlton were market gardeners looking to provide food for the city’s markets, while in our hamlet there were just three farms of varying size which employed all of the fourteen agricultural labourers.

And unlike Chorlton where the population was drawn from across the UK, in Alsop en le dene only three of the forty-six were not born on Derbyshire or the neighbouring county of Staffordshire.

Added to which of the thirty-one from Derbyshire, eight were born in the hamlet with another twelve from nearby villages.

None of which is a surprise.

The fun will be to track the residents over the eighty years from 1841 through to 1921, charting who went and who stayed, and what if anything changed in the occupations of those who lived there.

A glance at later returns show that the coming of the railway in the 1890s offered up one new occupation, and in turn may have allowed others to look for work in Ashbourne and Buxton which were the two towns at either end of the railway line.

I suspect that at the end of the study we will be left with that knowledge that not a lot changed in Alsop en le dene.

But the stories are there like Francis and Millicent Austen who were married in the neigbouring village of Tessington in 1850 and were in one of the cottages in the hamlet the following year.

He was an agricultural labourer aged 34 and she was eight years younger, had been a servant and had a son born out of wedlock.  I doubt that Francis was the father given that in 1851 the boy retained his mother’s maiden name and did so throughout his life.

By 1861 the family had moved on leaving others to continue the story of the hamlet.

Location; Alsop le dene

Pictures; Alsop le dene, in 1851 & 2019 from the collection of Andrew Simpson