“When Ludlam looked smilingly,
And joyful did remain,
It seemed St. Steven was standing by
For to be stoned again.”
There is a tradition that these unfortunate men were secreted at Padley in the chimneys of the old chapel; but such as see the place will agree with Doctor Cox that it is more probable that their hiding place was in the hall itself.
Hathersage’s best claim to fame lies in the fact that Robin Hood’s best henchman, Little John, lies in the churchyard. Moorseats Hall, a hillside grange scarcely visible from the valley roads, was used by Charlotte Brontë as the background of the least-interesting part of Jane Eyre. It was there that Jane’s cousins, the Rivers family, dwelt, and the impossible but none the less admirably imagined St. John was presumably vicar of that graceful church. Hathersage is rapidly losing its old charm; rows of genteel “villa residences” are being built, and the place is becoming nothing more than a suburb of the great manufacturing town beyond the hill.
Farther down the valley a strange eighteenth-century house stands on a thickly wooded bank of the river. This is Stoke Hall, once the Peakland home of the Earls of Bradford. The neighbouring folk in former years used to tell a weird story of a skull that haunted the upper story, and one may be sure that they feared to pass alone after “edge o’ dark”. Although Stoke has no pretensions to architectural beauty, its position suggests romance and mystery. In the wood near by stands a renaissance statue known as “Fair Flora”, a gift from the “long-armed” Duke of Devonshire to a member of the Bridgman family, but by popular belief a monument raised to the memory of a young lady who was murdered by a jealous lover.
The Arkwrights once occupied Stoke, and as a child I remember hearing, from an old gaffer, stories of Stephen Kemble—Mrs. Robert Arkwright’s father—who was so corpulent that his calves slipped over his shoe-tops! Perhaps it was at Stoke that the lady set to music Campbell’s song of the brave Roland who expired at Ronceval, a romance beloved by the contraltos of our grandsires’ days.
After Stoke, the Derwent, crossing a great weir, runs over a stony bed to Calver, then through green meadows to Baslow, from whose steep bridge there is a view almost as beautiful as that at Bakewell. Close by stands the little church, disfigured with a grotesque “Jubilee” clock dial. In the vestry may be seen a dog-whip, with which in less civilized times the verger drove out the offending animals. The Derwent has no gorges like the Wye and the Dove. It suggests a comfortable placidity, whilst the others seem young, more vivacious, and reckless.