the Glory Stones, or the Reform Stone. What glory did they refer to? What long-forgotten reforms? You could write a book about these stones, and unravel an entire layer of Derbyshire history just from their names. For all he knew, someone might have written that book already.
In the Middle Ages, the only exceptions a traveller might stumble over were the crosses set up by monastic landowners. These weren’t just an aid to travel; they marked the boundaries of property and reminded everyone of the power of the Catholic Church. Monasteries had felt it important to mark out their territory, even out here on the moors. An ancient cross base and the stump of a shaft were all that remained of the Lady Cross on Big Moor.
But guide stoops had been erected following the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War, to help all the extra trade generated by an improving economy. Derbyshire was slow to follow orders from central government – which was pretty much in character, he supposed. And in the end its guide stoops had been erected in a hurry, early in the eighteenth century.
Cooper knew he’d seen some of these stoops. He’d passed them when he was out walking, had stopped to look at them out of curiosity, and had their history explained to him. They were inscribed with the names of the nearest market towns in each direction, to help guide those travellers venturing into the wilds of Derbyshire.
He looked at the symbol on the message again, and the scrawled inscription, Sheffeild Rode. A guide stoop, then. But which one?
The path from the car park above Riddings passed the first guide stoop within a few yards. It was positioned just above the road, over the first stile – a tall, rectangular block of stone, well embedded in the ground. Carved from the local gritstone, it stood about five and a half feet high, and was a foot wide on each of its four faces.
‘This is a guide stoop?’ said Villiers, running her hand over the rough surface.
‘One of them.’
This stone was in too exposed a location, though, and had suffered badly from the weather over the last three hundred years. There must have been lettering cut into each of the faces, but the stone surfaces were totally eroded and the inscriptions illegible. All Cooper could make out was a ‘V’ sign on one face.
He pointed at the OS map.
‘We need to follow this track to the next one,’ he said.
Sheep sheltered under a hawthorn tree, the ground beneath it worn bare by their hooves. In places, the bracken came up to Cooper’s shoulders. But the masses of heather were coming into flower, turning the more distant hills into a purple haze.
They crossed a muddy stream on a bridge made of planks covered in wire mesh. A steep climb past the old walled enclosures brought them to a modern signpost at the top, pointing the way to White Edge and Birchen Edge.
Looking back, Cooper could see thirty or forty beehives sheltered in the lee of a wall in one of the enclosures. When he stood still, he became aware of the buzzing all around him. Thousands of honey bees were humming through the heather.
In the middle of the moor, there were no extraneous sounds, only the closest thing you could ever get to silence. The stillness made him more aware of the life stirring under his feet as he walked. Birds and rabbits scuttled away from his approach. The sweet scent of the heather blossom rose into the air with every step.
There were many boggart holes in the bare earth. Some of them looked deep, dug by animals into the shallow peat. Reddish-brown soil had been kicked out of the larger holes. You could put your arm right down into them, if you weren’t too worried about what you might touch. This was adder country, after all.
‘This place is full of legends, you know,’ he said.
‘Nice things, legends. I like ’em.’
‘You know about hobs, Carol?’
‘I know you have to show them respect, or they cause mischief in the house.’
‘You got that from your grandmother?’
‘Of course.’
Not too long ago, a bowl of cream would have been left on many Derbyshire hearths to ensure that the hobs did good for the household. Of course, many people believed that a hob’s real home was out here, in the wild landscape. There was a Hob Hurst’s House in Deep Dale, and another on Beeley Moor, just to the south of here.
Over there was an area called Leash Fen, said to have been a community the size of a small market town. There was nothing to be seen now. According to the stories, the town had sunk into the bog, and vanished without a trace. It sounded unlikely, until you went up there. In the winter, with your feet sinking deep into the ground, your trousers wet up to the knee, it was possible to imagine the fate of Leash Fen. If you had the imagination, you could even picture the ruins of the stone houses lying mouldering under the ground as the bog deepened over the centuries. In fact, there were probably other things under there too. Animals that had strayed off the track, a crashed Second World War German bomber, and maybe the odd hiker who had never returned home. Cooper wondered if global warming would dry out the bog one day, revealing all the buried secrets of Leash Fen.
They walked across the moor, following a faint track through the heather, until they came to another guide stoop. This one was smaller, less than three feet tall, possibly only the top half of a broken stone.
Cooper recalled that there was supposed to be one that had been damaged by gunfire when the military were training on the moor during the war. He felt that was further on, though – in Deadshaw Sick, near Barbrook Reservoir. This one had just fallen or been broken accidentally. It was probably a common fate for moorland stones. Yet the inscriptions were clear on each face. Chasterfield Road, Hoope Road, Dronfeld Road. The way the names of the towns were spelled must have reflected the accent of the stonemason, he supposed. None of the men who chiselled the letters on these guide stoops in the eighteenth century would have been entirely literate. Yet each of them had their own ideas about spelling. This one knew how to spell ‘road’, at least.
‘Not this one,’ he said.
‘How many more are there?’ asked Villiers.
‘I’m not sure. A lot of them will have disappeared over the decades. But at one time they would have been all over these moors. They were the only means the packhorse men had of navigating their way across, especially when there was snow on the ground to cover the trails.’
Cooper imagined the immense task it must have been to get these guide stoops into position. A full-sized stone had to weigh around four hundred kilos. Once they had been shaped and inscribed by the stonemason, they had to be transported from the mason’s yard, brought as far as possible by horse and cart, then probably dragged by wooden sledge and manpower to their final position.
‘In that case, we could spend all day out here.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Cooper.
He turned his body through three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to orientate himself. He could picture the old packhorse men doing this, too, taking their position from the sun or stars, or from a distant landmark.
Over that way, if you took a route directly across the moor, you would enter South Yorkshire and emerge in woods near the hamlet of Unthank. But in the other direction, you were in Derbyshire, the Derwent Valley – in the villages below the edges.
‘This way,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be too far.’
After five more minutes of walking, Villiers stopped and pointed across the moor.
‘Is that one over there?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
They could soon see a full-sized stone, standing straight and upright. For Cooper, it was as welcome a sight as it might have been for many weary travellers crossing this moor. When they reached it, Villiers rubbed a patch of lichen off the inscription.
‘It’s a bit eroded, but…’
‘What does it say?’
‘ Sheffeild Rode. This is it, Ben.’
She looked flushed and excited, like a child who’d just won a treasure hunt, or discovered a hidden Easter egg.
They walked round it, exploring the wonderful tactile surface of the rough gritstone, tracing the letters on each of the four faces. Bakwell Rode, Tidswall Rode, Hatharsich Rode. And most carefully of all, they studied the symbol chiselled into the stone below Sheffeild . The horizontal line and arrow. The surveyor’s benchmark. The
