The Lych Gate, the Raven Oak and the Lady Park
In the Company of Ghosts | Benevolent Dictatorship | The Wayfarer's Chapel | An Anglo-Danish Tautology | Raven Oaks | Times of Fading
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
From ‘The Self-Unseeing’ by Thomas Hardy
We walk always in the company of ghosts, the unseen multitudes that have gone before us, who have trodden our familiar paths, our familiar streets and crossed the thresholds of our homes that they called home before us. The hollows grooved into old floors, often by hearths and doors, were made by their now quiet feet and continue to be made by our own fleeting steps, which in turn will fall silent to be replaced by others. Following footpaths in old towns, that thread out from important meeting points such as market squares and churches, we are gently herded in the directions that these ghosts while living took; we are directed to take up their habits. Our towns are palimpsests of age and time and looming above garish shop facades are windows that have looked out to the street below for many centuries - ghosts can throng even in a Greggs or a Superdrug. Some towns and cities have famed and well-preserved old areas, like the Shambles in York or the famous city walls of Chester, which locals, tourists and people in charge of the towns’ marketing are consciously aware of. In truth antiquity and modernity are cheek by jowl in most corners of every village, town, city and in the countryside.
In Belper, an old market town and for a time the most important settlement in the old deer forest of Duffield Frith, the northwest side is often referred to as ‘Old Belper’. It has earned this title because it is the most obviously aged part of the town, a leafy corner with small terraced homes of brick and gritstone, a cobbled street, and a vanishingly small number of the nailers’ sheds that hint at the old lifeblood of the town. The early cottages were built in the 18th century by the industrialist Jedidiah Strutt for his workers, part of his so-called ‘benevolent dictatorship’; the story goes that he drilled holes in the shutters of his workers’ windows and fined anyone who was up too late, betrayed by the glow of their candles or lamps. In return for hard toil, rigid rules and surveillance his mill workers were given relatively decent working conditions, comfortable homes close to the mills and schooling for their children. In Old Belper too are the Strutt Mills, the older North Mill built in 1804 and the 1912 East Mill - the first fireproof factory and, as another story would have it, the world’s first skyscraper.
But the true ancient seat of the old town lies southeast of the mills and workers’ cottages and at its beating heart is 13th century St John’s, an old Foresters’ Chapel and Belper’s oldest building. Pass through the lych gate and crouching in a hollow in the shadows of yew and sycamore, rowan and hornbeam, and in the shadows too of its own vast age, is St John’s Chapel and churchyard. When the chapel was built around 1250, it would have stood alone, a refuge in wild country for passing wayfarers and the faithful foresters of the Old Frith to worship in. Now it is encircled by busy streets and roads, but this part of the town still possesses many signs of age radiating out from the old chapel, which sits at the core like a squat spider - the jewel of its own tattered web. The chapel has a no-nonsense beauty and is built in rough-hewn chunks of the local Millstone Grit, the building blocks of Derbyshire and other counties that lie on or close to the Pennines. Although only sanctioned for burials in 1535, there are older graves in the churchyard from times of plague, when in desperation St John’s was used by the community to bury their many dead.
How many people must pass through this churchyard and contemplate the history around them, and what do they hear as they stand at the lych gate, when the stream of cars from Nottingham Road pauses? Do they hear the fretting of sheep flocks and the yips and curses of their masters driving them to market, crooks in hand? Or the hiss and thud of arrows, as archers practise their aim? For hard by the churchyard is another place of great age called The Butts, once sizeable, open and an important focal point of the town. It clamours with its ghosts, all preoccupied with the concerns of their own time. In recent centuries, great fairs capable of holding 50,000 cattle were held at The Butts, and expectant lads and lasses were hired in the traditional way of the old hiring fairs for a year’s graft on the surrounding farms. Behind these ghosts crowd older ones still, the archers and later the musketeers who practised their firing here and occasionally used this place to muster in times of war - whether or not they were ready to put their skills to the ultimate test.
Leaving this place to its modern bustle and fading memories, the wooded slopes of Belper Parks next to The Butts run south down to the Coppice Brook that flows through it. Now a nature reserve and public park, it was once Little or Lady Park, a small enclosed deer park and an important centre of the hunting forest from around the mid-1200’s. The Manor House, used for domestic and administrative purposes by the noble families the de Ferrers and later the Lancastrians, looked down onto the pleasant landscape from what is now the Coppice Car Park (a political hot potato in Belper at the time of writing as the town council propose turning it from a free to paid car park). Remarkably, considering the vast changes to and urban sprawl of the town in the intervening centuries, Belper Parks still holds much of its ancient character. Though half of it has been subsumed by the once notorious and still troubled Parks Estate (its streets named after the the trees that were destroyed to build it), the other half retains much of its ancient boundaries and parts of its walls, ditches and banks are still intact. Up in the holly thickets by the estate there is a wild feel to the park and although the tree cover here is quite young, amongst the twisted muscular holly trunks and the thick twilight that gathers under the eaves it is easy to trick oneself into believing that this part of the park still keeps medieval time.
Older time is indeed kept by some of Belper’s place-names. I marvel at the evidence of a vanished world that is bound to our time by the long guardianship of place-names. Lady Park, the park’s early name, suggests a place where noble ladies could pass mild afternoons watching the deer, or else comes from the Old English hlaefdise meaning Our Lady. Becksitch Lane, that runs by the park is an Anglo-Danish tautology - beck is Scandinavian, and sitch Saxon, for stream. Around the old Lady Park are many names that are bound up with their medieval past. Cowhill on the south-east of the park boundary remembers the cow houses of the Old Frith, where the estate men of old would house and feed their lord’s cattle. These facilities would have needed a steady supply of water and The Fleet, which flanks Cowhill, is suggestive of a man-made water course or drain. Records show that a water conduit was laid near here in 1327, possibly to serve the nearby cow- and deer-houses. Perhaps the waters of the beck or sitch of Becksitch Lane were re-directed for this purpose. Ravenoak Road, now rather nondescript, may recall a fair old oak ‘in the midst of the park with a large top for building timber and it is called the Raven Oak’, which was recorded in a wood survey of 1614.1 When the medieval nobility hunted deer, Raven Oaks were a part of the hunting ritual. After the kill, ladies would place the corbin bone of the deer (believed to be the pelvis bone) in a tree as the ravens’ portion. What would happen if they failed to appease the black birds, the place-names do not tell us. Fleet, Cowhill, Becksitch, Ravenoak: these names, or variations of them, have been uttered in this part of Belper for time out of mind: a spell of the past, incanted daily and unwittingly by the everyday folk of the town.
While names boldy proclaim the park and town’s past, some of its history is buried. Under the ground, encased, Belper Parks has a secret. In a patch of woodland very near one of the entrances there was once a much frequented well, now vanished after being turned into a reservoir by the indefatigable and ever pragmatic Victorians. The well’s name, Lady Well, could suggest that it was once considered a holy place and named after the Virgin Mary. Its repute is described in R.C. Hope’s The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England:
‘Was the Lady Well famous in days gone by for saintly and medicinal properties? If so its fame still lingers, unconsciously, perhaps, in the minds of the people, for they still make journeys of a mile or two, carrying with them a glass or a mug, to drink its waters. From Duffield, and other places round about, people used to come, years ago, in parties to the Lady Well, bringing not only vessels from which to drink the water, but ‘noggins’ [cups] in which to carry back a supply for home drinking. Afflicted persons have been seen bathing.’
More ghosts here then, in the nondescript patch of wood where the well once stood, a once signifigant piece of folklore bricked up and forgotten about.
Sometimes, above the traffic noise and persistent din of 21st century life, it’s hard to feel the age of St John’s and its surrounding lands. Sometimes, it’s impossible not to. Particularly in autumn or at twilight - times of fading. One day before dawn I stood on the green in front of the chapel under a moon wrapped in the bare branches of silver birch like a fat salmon in a net. The wind sighed and the night clouds sped. Most folk were still abed and the human world for once was silent. I felt the years fall from St John’s and the softly-lit chapel might have been as it was centuries ago with a lantern swinging from the porch, a guide in the dark for the lost and weary.
Duffield Frith: History and Evolution of the Landscape of a Medieval Derbyshire Hunting Forest by Mary Wiltshire, Sue Woore, Barry Crisp and Brian Rich.