Distance: Just over 5 miles
Difficulty of the Terrain: Easy
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps
Walk in the fringes of Derbyshire’s White Peak along a preserved section of the Cromford Canal from Ambergate Station up to Cromford. Cromford – played a pivotal role in the birth of the factory system – sits at the top of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
The Arkwright’s Type of Mill Town
Nestling just south of the Peak District National Park, a very short way from the quirky and very historic former (or rather current…) lead mining capital of Derbyshire, Wirksworth, Cromford is in my view one of the Midland’s best villages.
It has just under 1,500 inhabitants, which is enough to be lively, and thanks to TransDev’s TransPeak and Sixes bus services, as well as its location on the Matlock railway line it is unusually well connected.
Right at the heart of the village sits a large rectangular body of water. Where other villages in Derbyshire and beyond have a green Cromford has a pond. Set against the backdrop of dramatic limestone cliffs, and with shops, houses and all manner of other establishments dating back to the 18th Century clustered around it, it is a lovely and tranquil centre piece for the village.
It is also the key to why Cromford exists in its current form at all. In 1771 Cromford was a cluster of houses next to the main road which wound arduously around limestone outcrops up the Matlock Bath.
This was the year that an early capitalist by the name of Richard Arkwright opened his mill. Richard Arkwright’s business idea was to set up a cotton spinning workshop harnessing the natural gravitational power of the water flowing down the River Derwent and it’s tributaries which flow near Cromford. The water would drive wheels which would enable cotton to be spun for all manner of fabrics on a – literally – industrial scale.
Richard Arkwright’s was not a totally new idea. A large water powered silk mill had been set up 15 or so miles down the River Derwent in the middle of Derby over 50 years before in 1719. Cotton, unlike silk however, was a popular commodity.
It was also one which caused a lot of misery. Richard Arkwright’s innovations increased demand for the plant which fired the growth of the use of the labour of enslaved Black Africans in the south of the USA. It also spurred the growth of the British East India Company who through incredibly brutal and corrupt means came to dominate the control the Indian subcontinent. In the 18th Century India was the world’s largest exporter of cotton goods. Richard Arkwright’s processes enabled the UK to seize this market, undermine Indian manufacturing and come to dominate and colonise South Asia over the course of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Indeed it was Richard Arkwright’s commercial success and the success of other early capitalists who emulated him which brought about the British government in 1774 abolishing the law which forbade the import of Indian textiles into the UK.
As Richard Arkwright’s industrial empire of water powered textile mills located around Cromford grew, workers flooded into the area. Within years of him setting up his first mill in 1771 it was reckoned that 5,000 people in and around Cromford worked in the textile industry.
In a pattern that was followed by other early industrialists (like the Strutt family 8 miles down the River Derwent at Belper), Richard Arkwright planned and developed Cromford as a settlement for his workforce.
Factory conditions were quite different in the 1770s and 1780s to how they became later. Much like with platform capitalism today, where initially favourable conditions and renumeration encourages workers to begin supplying services to or through the platform, work in Richard Arkwright’s factories was preferable in many ways to the situations that his workers were leaving. It was only later once the working class was fully formed that employers began really squeezing the pips.
Workers at Cromford worked long days, but were pretty well paid, and had access to good housing and services, by the standards of late 18th Century central Derbyshire.
In the first decades of the factory system many parts of the textile and garment production process had yet to be industrialised. This meant that weavers and garment workers often still tended to work for themselves, undertaking traditional craft labour. Whilst Richard Arkwright and his fellow early capitalists tried with various degrees of success to pressure and exert control over them, these craft people still had almost complete control over the mode and means of production. There was little at this stage that the capitalists could do about it.
For this reason amongst the older houses in Cromford there are some tall, three storey ones, with weaving lofts. Here weavers worked independently to make cloth from the thread Richard Arkwright’s factories spun.
At this time steam engines did exist. They had been used to pump water for over two generations, and Matthew Boulton and James Watt were going into business together just outside Birmingham. However, the idea of applying steam power to spinning and weaving had not yet taken off. For this reason Richard Arkwright and other mill owners jealously guarded their water supplies.
This extended to the Cromford Canal when it was proposed to build it for the purpose of transporting lead, limestone, coal and materials and goods associated with cotton production, from central Derbyshire to the River Trent.
Richard Arkwright was initially supportive of the proposal which his mills in and around Cromford would have benefited from. However, late in the planning stages he objected the plans for water to be taken from the Cromford Sough, part of the drainage for the lead mines at Wirksworth, which fed into the mill pond in the centre of Cromford. He refused to allow the canal onto his land unless the water supply conduit was moved to a bit higher up the Derwent basin.
Conviniently for Richard Arkwright the proposed water supply was just above his brand new Masson Mill, just outside Matlock Bath, the first phase of which had commenced production in 1783. The water needed for the canal would now have to be channeled through his mill allowing him to use it to turn the waterwheels which powered his factory with more energy than before. The builders and promoters of the Cromford Canal were not too happy about this, but they had little choice other than acquiesce, and constructed a water supply system for the canal that made Richard Arkwright and his family a little bit richer.*
As is often the way later generations of the Arkwright family were not that interested in manufacturing. They became bankers instead. Likewise, the adoption of steam power for textile mills in the 19th Century meant that Cromford’s location stopped being a commercial advantage. The focus of British textile manufacturing shifted further north to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Which is not to say that, that was the end of textile making at Cromford. On the contrary parts of Richard Arkwright’s original factories remained producing dyes and other ancillaries to textile making well into the 20th Century.
However, today Cromford is mostly an attractive village on the edge of the Peak District. Visitors can see much of the preserved industrial heritage of the area and get a feel for where the factory system, mass cotton production, and all of the social and ecological consequences that has had, began.
*Actually, the Cromford Canal Company sneakily had no intention of going along with Richard Arkwright’s self benefiting plan. They did end their canal at Cromford, and did draw their water from Cromford Sough. But it cost them £1000 (millions in today’s money) and a massive landscape gardening job… But that’s another story.
The Walk
This walk starts from Ambergate Railway Station.
At Ambergate Railway Station, which is the point at which the branch line to Matlock diverts from the mainline and continues heading up the Derwent Valley.
From the station platform turn right and head out onto the forecourt.
Walk across the forecourt heading left. This leads past a short terrace of houses.
On your left you come to a short flight of steps (there’s also a road leading down just after it. Head down these.
At the bottom of the steps you come to a main road. Here there is a bridge which carries the railway line north to Matlock. Walk under the bridge.
On the other side of the bridge opposite The Hurt Arms pub, turn right along the main road.
Continue along the road for some distance.
Presently on the right hand side of the road there is a lane running between an inter war era white rendered house and a much more recent redbrick one.
Head down this lane and walk under the bridge.
Continue up the lane on the other side, walking uphill. The terrain on this side of the railway line is far more rural in character.
After some distance, just before reaching a house, there is a signpost pointing off the lane to the left.
This leads down a short sloping path to the towpath of the Cromford Canal. You then head straight ahead and follow the towpath all of the way to Cromford, which is about 5 miles away.
The Cromford Canal has been disused since the early decades of the 20th Century. Further east towards Langley Mill where it joined the Nottingham Canal (also now abandoned) the line of the canal has not been maintained and in places has vanished entirely.
The Ambergate to Cromford section, however, has been partially restored and remains in water. There is a friends group, and much of the upkeep, as well as the Canal’s ownership, sits with Derbyshire County Council who have maintained it since the 1970s as a local nature reserve and linear park for people to walk and cycle through (watch out for the cyclists, there were a fair few of them when I walked the route in April 2022).
The towpath makes for a pleasant place to walk. It also parallels the railway line up to Matlock which follows a slightly lower alignment.
Just before you reach the halfway point of the walk the canal passes through the small – excellently named – village of Whatstandwell.
After Whatstandwell the towpath takes on a rural character once more.
Soon you come to the Gregory Tunnel. This short (but dark) tunnel takes the canal and its towpath through a big chunk of limestone.
On the far side of the tunnel the landscape starts to feel more and more like the Peak District. The hills seeming taller and steeper.
The canal also begins to take on a more kempt character. Almost as if sometimes boats do go along this section.
Soon you come to a short aqueduct which carries the canal across the railway line as it wends its way towards Matlock.
A short distance after the aqueduct you approach High Peak Junction. Once upon a time High Peak Junction was a busy canal wharf which allowed transhipment between the canal and railway networks. Today it is maintained as a heritage attraction by Derbyshire County Council. It is also home to a couple of still working steam engines, one of which was constructed in the late 1840s to provide water to the canal.
Amongst the attractions are a cafe and a museum (as well as public toilets) run by Derbyshire County Council. The museum purports to showcase the world’s oldest standard gauage railway workshop.
After High Peak Junction there is only around a mile or so to go until you reach Cromford. The landscape, and even the water, have taken on the distinctive chalky, limestone quality associated with the southern half of the Peak District.
Approaching the end of the canal, and the end of the walk, you cross Cromford Meadows on the outer perimeter of the village.
Soon the wharf at the end of the canal comes into view.
Upon reaching the wharf, cross it heading for the road on the far side.
Once on the road you can either head left up past Arkwright’s Mill to the centre of Cromford or right towards the railway station. The walk up to the village centre takes no more than 10 minutes. This point is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
For a place of its size Cromford has very good public transport connections. Trains from Cromford Station take you more or less hourly, south towards Derby or north towards Matlock. Buses – which are a bit more frequent than the trains but slower – go to other nearby towns like Middleton and Wirksworth, as well as north towards Buxton and Bakewell.