Only in late autumn and winter do you get such mornings, a thin cold mist hugging the ground, spiders’ webs smothered in dew, and a low sun straining to burn it off. I was walking a section of the Limestone Way, a waymarked path that winds north from Ashbourne through the White Peak to Castleton. The day would be beautiful, but, for now, the stately ash trees common in this corner of Derbyshire loomed out of the grey like spectral giants.
Just outside the village of Bonsall, I passed through a narrow gate into what looked like a battlefield. Everywhere I turned, there were eruptions in the earth, like shell-holes, an apparently blasted landscape disappearing into the fog at the field’s edge. There was a narrow fissure too, thick with shrubs and a hawthorn heavy with fruit, extending into the distance. Every so often, walking through the wet grass, I came across old concrete railway sleepers laid across a hole to save the unwary from falling in.
All this scarring evidenced Derbyshire’s lead-mining industry,
