SECTION III. View from the Hills above. Juvenile Beggars Winnats. Mawe and Whitehurst. Faujas St. Fond. PEAK'S HOLE is commonly the first object of those who visit Castleton, and they generally proceed immediately from one subterranean excursion to another. We, however, preferred traversing for a while the surface of terra firma, before we again "left the warm precincts of the cheerful day” to explore the gloomy recesses of Speedwell Mine; passing, therefore, through a part of the village between the church and Castle Hill, we entered a narrow dell, called the Cave, into which we were admitted through a rocky portal, about six feet wide. This deep ravine is closely hemmed in with rock on every side; and, with one solitary exception, neither shrub nor tree is to be seen within it. Rude weather-beaten crags, with occasionally a stripe of thin mossy verdure inserted between, constitute the two sides of this dell, which, in some places, is from eighty to one hundred paces wide, and in others not more than twenty or thirty. About two-thirds up the dell, the view towards Castleton has a wildness about it that no other landscape in the same neighbourhood possesses. The castle, seated on the extreme verge of a narrow ridge of rock, looks fearfully tremendous, borrowing importance from the situation it occupies amongst the rocks and precipices that are thrown around it. Near the village, where the two sides of the dell approximate, a pleasing view is admitted of distant hills, whose shadowy summits and cultivated slopes give a character of loveliness to the remote parts of the scene. At the upper extremity of Cave Dale a contracted pass, similar in dimensions and appearance to the one by which we had entered, dismissed us into a more open valley. The path, though still slippery 190 VIEW FROM THE HILLS ABOVE CAVE DALE. and rugged, became less precipitous as we proceeded, and we followed its windings until we attained the top of an extensive eminence, where we joined the road that leads from Castleton to Tideswell. Here we were amply rewarded for the toil we had sustained, by one of the most delightful landscapes in any part of the Peak. We stood on an immense sweep of hill extending on our right beyond High-low to the river Derwent, where it meets that part of the East Moor called Millstone Edge, in the vicinity of Hathersage; from whence another chain of mountains, of greater altitude, is continued in a westerly direction by Win-Hill, Lose-Hill, and Mam Tor; thence, turning to the south and south-east by the Winnats and Long-Cliff, the circuit terminates at the place where we stood, forming, altogether, a continued a continued range of eighteen or twenty miles of lofty hills, within whose capacious circle lie the dales of Hathersage, Brough, Hope, and Castleton, rich in beauteous meadows, and adorned with woods and cottages and winding streams. Following the road to Castleton, we re-entered the village nearly at the same place where we had left it: here again we were assailed by boys and girls, begging with unceasing clamour for halfpence, or whatever their importunity can obtain. This is one of the intolerable evils of Castleton; every visitor condemns the practice, which he contributes to perpetuate, by rewarding the perseverance of the half-clad rogues by whom he is pestered. Here the child, as soon as he can articulate, is taught to beg; educated in the practice, all his actions and feelings are mendicant, and he begs mechanically through life, without a sensation of either shame or meanness. Nothing but a determination not to give can ever cure this degrading propensity. We now took a short excursion along the new road to Mam Tor, intending to return down the Winnats to Speedwell Mine. This was a loitering ramble, as we were frequently detained by the road side, hunting for crystallized fluors and marine impressions. Here we found many specimens of shells, beautifully and distinctly marked. The limestone strata are full of them; and they are so perfectly and accurately formed, that one cannot but conclude that they once existed in another state. The correctness of Dr. Leigh's theory, "that these representations of creatures and their parts, and also the other modifications of matter which are found in Poole's Hole and the mines of this country, are purely the wanton sportings or lusus naturæ of the fluor stalactites, caused by different mixtures of bituminous, saline, and terrene particles," will be disputed by nearly every man who visits Castleton, and attentively examines the rocks and the marine impressions they contain. Midway up the hill, along whose base we were grovelling, are the mines of Tray-Cliff and Water-Hull - the subterraneous excavations where that elegant spar, provincially called Blue John, is obtained. A long series of rugged steps, hewn in the limestone rock, leads to the principal of these caverns: here the fluor is found in detached pieces of from one to sixteen or eighteen inches thick; but large blocks of this beautiful material are extremely rare. The cells of Tray Cliff mine may be explored with but little inconvenience: their dimensions are various, and their sides and roofs are adorned with spars and stalactites, which, as the light of the torch sports amongst them, shift their resplendent reflexions as rapidly as the corruscations of the northern sky. ODIN MINE next attracted our attention: it is supposed to be the oldest in Derbyshire, and to have been worked by the Danes, as its name seems to import, nearly one thousand years ago. Its stock of ore is not yet exhausted, though the vein has been pursued through a lapse of many centuries. The entrance into this mine is at the base of the hill, within a few yards of the road. Its direction is nearly horizontal, and as it is tolerably spacious within, it is easy of access; its interior may therefore be visited with but little inconvenience, and the manager will be found to be an attentive and obliging man, ever ready to gratify the curiosity of strangers. A gently-declining shaft, nearly one mile in length, leads to a vein of ore which in some places is fifty or sixty yards below the level of the entrance, and in others nearly as much above it. The ore is of various thicknesses, from three or four inches to as many feet, and nearly one hundred people are employed in getting and preparing it for the smelting-mill. Many beautiful crystallizations of blende, barytes, fluor, calcareous spar, selenite, &c. &c. are found in this extensive mine, and occasionally that curious mineral called slikensides, whose mysterious properties were noticed in the first part of this work. Mr. Mawe, in his Mineralogy of Derbyshire, says, "I have seen a man when he came out of this mine only a few minutes after the explosion, who, regardless of danger, had pierced the sides of this substance, and was much hurt, and cut vio 192 MAM TOR AND EDale. lently, as if stabbed about the neck and other places with a chisel, whence he was unable to return to the mine for two weeks." We were now at the foot of MAM TOR, one of the seven wonders of the Peak, and yet we observed nothing wonderful about it, for we could not persuade ourselves of the fact that it is incessantly shivering away without any diminution of its bulk. It is an immense hill composed of a very flaky substance; and sometimes in winter, during a severe frost, the decomposition is so rapid, that the shivering mountain, as it is called, keeps a continual discharge, accompanied with a gentle noise, resembling the sound of a river passing over its pebbled bed, as it comes upon the ear softened by distance. I once, during the stillness of a November night, heard the rush of this mountain very distinctly in my bed-room in Castleton, and I listened to the murmurs that it made, but was utterly unable to discover the cause. From the top of Mam Tor, one thousand three hundred feet above the level of the valley below, we had a delightful view into EDALE, which a modern tourist has described as "a place in which the inhabitants, secluded in the bosom of the mountains from the bustle of the world, appear to enjoy all the quiet and security that pervaded the happy vale of Rasselas." The view from this eminence is not of a common description: the most striking features of the Peak of Derbyshire - its loftiest hills, and some of its loveliest dales included in the prospect. are From the summit of Mam Tor a walk of a mile brought us to the entrance into the WINNATS. One of the peculiarities of the scenery of Derbyshire is the sudden transition from barrenness to cultivation, and from cheerless eminences to delightful and luxuriant vales. This rapid change is no where more strikingly exemplified than in the approach to Castleton from Chapel-en-le-frith. The road is carried over a long range of bleak mountain ground until it arrives at the western extremity of the Winnats, or Wind-gates-poetically called by some writers "the portals of the winds." The Winnats is a deep and narrow defile, nearly one mile in length through this chasm the road winds into the valley below, amidst crags, and pinnacles, and piles of rock. Wild and savage in appearance as this ravine is, it is not entirely devoid of beauty: a number of elegant plants are scattered amongst the crags, and the mosses and lichens that chequer their sides blend their unobstrusive hues with the more gaudy colouring of the flowers by which they are surrounded. In some places the rocks are perpendicular, in others they are frightfully steep, and difficult of ascent even for any animal whatever; yet sheep are frequently seen grazing on the tops and sides of the loftiest projections, where apparently there is no space to stand on: I have sometimes felt giddy at beholding them, and have trembled with apprehension lest they should suddenly be dislodged from their insecure and scanty pasturage, and precipitated amongst the stones below. These useful little animals are often very happily introduced in landscape: the repose and stillness of a scene are improved by the presence of a flock of sheep at rest; but here they have a contrary effect on the bleak sides of the Winnats they can only occupy a situation of peril, where they increase the impression of danger, and make the place more terrible. Proceeding onward through the chasm, it gradually contracts; the two sides approximate nearly together, and lift their rent and broken summits so high into the air, that they appear to form an insuperable barrier to any farther progress. The irksome feeling of being close pent up in a narrow rift of rock is thus forcibly impressed upon the mind; a turn in the road, however, soon dissipates the idea of confinement; the borders of the pass gradually recede, until the dale, in which the villages of Castleton, Hope, and Brough, tranquilly repose, bursts upon the sight. The eye can hardly wander over a more delightful scene than is here displayed: such a landscape, even under circumstances less favourable, would be seen with pleasure, but heightened in effect by abrupt transition and striking contrast, it powerfully arrests attention, and sometimes exalts admiration into rapture. It was a fine sunny day as we passed through the Winnats; and whilst my companion was sketching by the side of a rocky projection, which protected him from the strong current of wind that sweeps, sometimes irresistibly, through this yawning chasm, I took a situation in a recess amongst the crags, high above the road, that afforded equal shelter. It was now midday, and all was still around us; not a sound was heard, save occasionally the wild scream of the hawk as it fluttered about its nest in a fissure of the rock far above us. The clamour of this noisy bird interrupted my meditations, and drew my attention upwards, when I beheld a creature "fashioned like myself" on the extreme verge of the highest rocky pin |