Calver

In 1870 James Croston, in his book On Foot Through The Peak noted that the air at Calver was ‘full of pale blue smoke that wreathed itself into a variety of fantastic looking clouds’ - a reference to the lime-burning and lead-smelting which still took place in late Victorian times. Sixty years later just before the Second World War, travel writer Thomas Tudor remarked, ‘Calver is not pretty for it has mills and lime works and ugly houses, and gives little suggestion of the rural charm which agriculture and its attendant interests can throw over these Derbyshire dales’.

These days the polluting smoke of industry is consigned to Calver’s past and despite heavy traffic over the Calver Bridge, built in 1974, the village still wears a cloak interwoven with threads of rural charm.

Calver is also home to one of the most sinister buildings known to television viewers with long memories. The handsome, though austere, Georgian Cotton Mill, which is now converted into luxury flats, was the infamous Colditz Castle of the television series of that name. It was built between 1803 and 1804 by Arkwright to replace a mill built in the 1780s.