The Midlands' Best Views

By Simon Jenkins

England's views are remarkable for their beauty and variety. In this illustrated, first-of-its-kind guide, bestselling author Simon Jenkins picks the very best views from the heart of England, including Broadway Tower, Chipping Campden, Clee Hill, Ironbridge Gorge, Malverns, Tyndale Monument, Chatsworth, Kinder Downfall, and more - and explains the fascinating stories behind them. Jenkins' entertaining and erudite entries provide the rich historical, geographical, botanical and architectural background to the Midlands' breathtaking sights both iconic and undiscovered.

Filled with roman roads, cliff-tops, follies, mountains, ancient castles, rolling forests and heart-stopping moments, you'll soon wonder how you chose walks, mini-breaks or spontaneous diversions without it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Oct 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782830634

Simon Jenkins

Sir Simon Jenkins is an award-winning journalist and author of several books on the politics, history and architecture of England. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC. He is the co-author of The Battle for the Falklands with Max Hastings. Jenkins was knighted for services to journalism in 2004.

Book preview

EAST MIDLANDS

Chatsworth: From the Derwent Valley

Dovedale: From Thorpe Cloud

Kinder Scout: From White Brow Hill

Mam Tor: To Stanage Edge

The Roaches: Towards Leek

CHATSWORTH

From the Derwent Valley

‘The eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of the valley, into which the road wound with some abruptness . . . a large, handsome, stone building standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills.’ So wrote Jane Austen, giving Elizabeth Bennet’s account of Darcy’s stately mansion in Pride and Prejudice. She continued, ‘In front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into one greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned.’

This can only be a view of Chatsworth. The passage is known to have been written when Austen was staying in neighbouring Bakewell. The setting was perfect for Darcy’s character, half disdainful, half assured. Chatsworth does not float in the sky like Castle Howard, or roar defiance at the world, like Blenheim. For all its wealth and beauty, it seems at peace with nature and Derbyshire in one. Most remarkable, it is built of millstone grit, so often the harshest and blackest of stone, yet here displayed in what might be the golden tones of Bath.

Chatsworth has long been the seat of the Cavendishes, a local family that married Bess of Hardwick in the sixteenth century and went on to become the grandest of grandees, dukes of Devonshire, Whig, liberal, mildly progressive. The house seems at first conspicuously retiring, set off-centre at the side of its valley, glowing beneath a wooded hanger on the hill above. There is no grand avenue, obelisk or belvedere to lead the eye to the house. Chatsworth borrows privacy from its surroundings. Only at night does the view from across the Derwent burst into magnificence, indeed literally electrified by the Chatsworth floodlights. Then the house becomes a golden palace in a darkened gallery.

‘Neither formal nor falsely adorned’, Chatsworth in the eighteenth century

The first duke’s architect after the Restoration was William Talman, such that the present south and east facades were influenced by the Franco-Dutch taste of the time. Twelve even bays with no central feature gaze down the valley, crowned only with a parapet. The west facade has a small pediment and was apparently designed by the duke himself. A long basement pedestal allows for the fall of the land.

The original gardens were laid out in the seventeenth-century style, with promenades, parterres, ponds and a long cascade down the hill. A baroque temple crowned its summit. Trees were planted in formal squares. The result depicted in a Kip and Knyff print of the early eighteenth century is like a Persian carpet laid across a flat Dutch polder. Then in 1755 Capability Brown arrived from Stowe to work his naturalistic magic. Promenades became curving hill walks. Parterres became lawns. Tens of thousands of trees were planted, many from America. A portrayal by William Marlow at the end of the century shows Chatsworth as if returned to the Derbyshire countryside.

The Regency brought another change. In 1826 the twenty-three-year-old Joseph Paxton, who had been working at