Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

by William Cullen Bryant

Edale in Derbyshire.

Derby, England, June 3, 1845.

I have passed a few pleasant days in Derbyshire, the chronicle of which I will give you.

On the morning of the 30th of May, we took places at Manchester in the stage-coach for Chapel-en-le-Frith. We waited for some time before the door of the Three Angels in Market-street, the finest street in Manchester, broad and well-built, while the porters were busy in fastening to the vehicle the huge loads of luggage with which the English commonly travel. As I looked on the passers by, I was again struck with what I had observed almost immediately on entering the town—the portly figures and florid complexions of some, and the very diminutive stature and sallow countenances of others. Among the crowds about the coach, was a ruddy round-faced man in a box-coat and a huge woollen cravat, walking about and occasionally giving a look at the porters, whom we took to be the coachman, so well did his appearance agree with the description usually given of that class. We were not mistaken, for in a short time we saw him buttoning his coat, and deliberately disentangling the lash from the handle of a long coach whip. We took our seats with him on the outside of the coach, and were rolled along smoothly through a level country of farms and hedge-rows, and fields yellow with buttercups, until at the distance of seven miles we reached Stockport, another populous manufacturing town lying in the smoke of its tall chimneys. At nearly the same distance beyond Stockport, the country began to swell into hills, divided by brooks and valleys, and the hedge-rows gave place to stone fences, which seamed the green region, bare of trees in every direction, separating it into innumerable little inclosures. A few miles further, brought us into that part of Derbyshire which is called the Peak, where the hills become mountains.

Among our fellow-passengers, was a powerfully made man, who had the appearance of being a commercial traveller, and was very communicative on the subject of the Peak, its caverns, its mines, and the old ruined castle of the Peverils, built, it is said, by one of the Norman invaders of England. He spoke in the Derbyshire dialect, with a strong provincial accent. When he was asked whether the castle was not the one spoken of by Scott, in his Peveril of the Peak, he replied,

"Scott? Scott? I dunna know him."

Chapel-en-le-Frith is a manufacturing village at the bottom of a narrow valley, clean-looking, but closely built upon narrow lanes; the houses are of stone, and have the same color as the highway. We were set down, with our Derbyshire friend, at the Prince's Arms, kept by John Clark, a jolly-looking man in knee-breeches, who claimed our fellow passenger as an old acquaintance. "I were at school with him," said he; "we are both Peakerels." John Clark, however, was the more learned man of the two, he knew something of Walter Scott; in the days when he was a coachman, he had driven the coach that brought him to the Peak, and knew that the ruined castle in the neighborhood was once the abode of Scott's Peveril of the Peak.

We procured here an odd vehicle called a car, with seats on the sides where the passengers sit facing each other, as in an omnibus, to take us to Edale, one of the valleys of Derbyshire. Our new acquaintance, who was about to proceed on foot to one of the neighboring villages, was persuaded to take a seat with us as far as his road was the same with ours. We climbed out of the valley up the bare green hills, and here our driver, who was from Cheshire, and whose mode of speaking English made him unintelligible to us, pointed to a house on a distant road, and made an attempt to communicate something which he appeared to think interesting. Our Derbyshire friend translated him.

"The water," said he, "that fall on one side of the roof of that 'ouse go into the 'Umber, and the water that fall on the other side go into the Mersey. Last winter that 'ouse were covered owre wi' snow, and they made a harchway to go in and out. We 'ad a heighteen month's storm last winter."

By an "eighteen month's storm" we learned, on inquiry, that he meant eighteen weeks of continued cold weather, the last winter having been remarkable for its severity.