Distance: 4.65 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

Walk across western central Derbyshire, partly rural, partly urban, it traversing one of the world’s oldest industrial regions, to reach the imposing late 18th and early 19th Century remains of Butterley Ironworks.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Lost Sections of the Cromford Canal

Butterley in eastern central Derbyshire is the quintessential town in its part of the East Midlands. Today it is quiet, neither immensely affluent, nor incredibly poor, surrounded by copious amounts of greenspace. However, stepping back into the recent past, in common with other towns clustered between the Rivers Amber and Erewash, Butterley was a major iron working and engineering centre. Where the middle and west of Derbyshire, be it Glossop or New Mills in the far north of the county, or Belper and Cromford in the centre, were historically home to textile works, initially powered by water, so towns on the edge of the East Midlands coalfield became metalworking centres. Remnants of which, sometimes quite large remnants, dot the landscape.

This part of Derbyshire was the territory of the Butterley Company which existed in one form or another for almost 220 years and at its peak in the 1950s employed 10,000 people. The BFI has made a fascinating film freely available online. One created in the earliest days of filmmaking when there was a brief fad of camera operators travelling the country and shooting a film of local happenings that could be quickly produced and screened locally. It depicts workers leaving the Butterley Company factory in 1900. Workers leaving factories was a popular subject for the films as shift changes could be readily timed and the large numbers of workers at big industrial employers, plus their families and friends, provided a ready audience for the films.      

Founded by Benjamin Outram, a local civil engineer and proto-entrepreneur, whose family money came from facilitating the land enclosure process, the company had interests in iron founding and coal mining alike. In the words of his own wife Benjamin Outram was “hasty in his temper, feeling his own superiority over others. Accustomed to command, he had little toleration for stupidity and slowness, and none for meanness or littleness of any kind.”

Evidently a disagreeable man, and a fairly short lived one, having died of a stroke aged forty one in 1805, the Butterley Company was created from the remains of Benjamin Outram’s industrial holdings in 1807. It endured in one form or another until 2009 when amidst the post credit crunch recession it succumbed to economic forces. Housing now occupies most of the site, though the oldest surviving parts of the works remain lying derelict, awaiting a plan to conserve it for the future coming to fruition. 

Despite Benjamin Outram’s early demise, the Butterley Company retained much of his unpleasant character, even by the standards of early 19th Century industrial employers. It is therefore not surprising that its fortress-like ironworks in Butterley were attacked by the former Luddites of 1817’s doomed Pentrich Revolution enroute to their eventual rout between Langley Mill and Eastwood. Some of the great walls and turret-like gatehouses that still surround the site are considered to date from that time.

Signs of their commitment to the early massification of production can be found in the Butterley Tunnel, a nearly three kilometre long marvel of late 18th Century engineering. Running beneath the plateau Butterley sits upon, the tunnel has a wharf deep in its bowels beneath the Butterley Ironworks site, where coal was loaded onto barges from one of Benjamin Outram’s collieries. His civil engineering work and connections having enabled him to take advantage of the Cromford Canal’s development to better move his goods to market. There are almost no comparable examples anywhere else in the UK and this part of the tunnel was declared a Scheduled Ancient Monument in 2013.

As the 19th Century gave way to the 20th so the Butterley Company became more and more specialist. In the 1980s its foundries closed, ending almost 200 years of basic metal production at Butterley. The fabrication and engineering parts of the business making cranes and bridges remained, still employing hundreds of people up until the company’s final closure in 2009. A speciality in the company’s later years was intricate metal parts of all sizes for many of the Millennium Commission’s most significant projects marking the year 2000. Much of the Falkirk Wheel and Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower were fabricated in Butterley. As of 2025 the firm’s name has recently been resurrected as a “brand” of Clarke Chapman, an engineering company owned by Langley Holdings.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

This walk from Ambergate to Butterley 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.

Upon reaching the towpath turn right and pass underneath a bridge.

This leads a couple of hundred metres along the tranquil, but incredibly overgrown Cromford Canal. Going the other way leads you eventually to Cromford, five miles up the canal, site of Arkwright’s Mill, the world’s first modern factory opened in 1771.

Soon you reach the end of the canal.

Here turn left and begin walking uphill along a chain fence behind which sits an engineering works apparently making, fixing, or otherwise working with industrial pipes.

After some distance the path emerges from the trees into a scrubby clearing partyway up the hillside.

Here turn right and follow the path as it continues running along a narrow but well worn route across the grassy scrub land above the factory yard.

After some distance it enters woodland. Walk through these trees for some distance.

Soon you come to a wooden gate on your right.

Head through the gate and down a sloping path through the trees.

After a short distance you come to some steps on your left. Walk down these steps.

At the bottom – opposite a new housing estate which was being built when I walked the route – turn left and walk up a well worn footpath.

This leads around the housing estate, heading to the right.

Continue walking along this path down a snicket which leads out beside the main road in the small (but rapidly expanding as new estates go up around it) village of Bullbridge.

Once beside the road turn right and walk downhill.

At the base of the hill, next to the River Amber there is a footpath sign off to your left leading along a track.

Turn left and walk along the track heading in the direction of two newly built conjoined yellow stone cottages.

There is a short tunnel beneath an embankment which you walk through.

On the far side of the tunnel take an immediate right turn. Walk along the footpath through trees for a short distance.

This leads to a new green metal footbridge across the Midlands Mainline. I must have passed beneath this bridge dozens of times over the years, first travelling by train up to York as an undergrad student, and in the decade or so since, on most of the numerous occasions that I have visited Yorkshire.

Cross over the bridge. On the far side you come out next to the busy A610 road. Apparently a stone aqueduct on the Cromford Canal once spanned the road at the point where you are crossing. It became derelict when the canal fell into disuse in the early 20th Century and was eventually demolished in 1968.

Here cross the road then head up a flight of steps cut into the bank on the far side.

At the top you emerge onto a well worn path along a bank, turn left here and begin walking.

The path runs behind a row of houses which front onto the A610.

It soon becomes apparent what the path you are walking along is. Next to you on the right there is the unmistakable outline of a canal cut. This is the former course of the Cromford Canal, fairly well preserved behind the houses and now serving as a footpath and ad-hoc green space. In places it has even been recently cleared. There are information boards dotted here and there which tell the history of the canal.

Here and there the line is broken. Just after a former canal bridge, turn right down a paved slope towards a road. Cross over the road and climb the steps on the far side to get back onto the former canal path.

After the steps keep on walking along the former canal cut, this section is less well preserved, but it is still clear where the canal once ran. The former canal route has now been appropriated by the residents of the houses fronting onto the A610 as outdoor storage space with garages and sheds of various types.

Presently you reach a short former tunnel, which you walk through.

This leads to the car park of the Excavator pub. Once a canal building.

Entering the car park of The Excavator pub, turn to the right.

On the right of the car park beside the A610 next to the side wall of the pub there is a cut through leading beneath a disused railway bridge to a larger rear car park.

Cross this car park heading for a wooden gate on the far side leading into woodland.

Pass through the footgate and carry on along the track on the far side through the woodland.

The track follows the course of the old canal.

Presently you come out into a meadow, keep following the track around the edge.

On the left you come to a fishpond formed from where the canal cut once ran. 

Walk around the fishpond on the left.

Just after passing it on the left you follow an indistinct path around heading for a former canal bridge still intact.

Having crossed the bridge on the right there is a stile leading through a narrow gap, down a short flight of steps down onto the former towpath.

Once on the path turn left and follow a short stretch of semi-preserved canal to a stile out into a field.

After crossing the stile walk straight ahead crossing the meadow.

The path runs clearly, crossing a small ditch marking a field boundary, approaching the small village of Lower Hartshay.

Nearing the edge of the village there is a gate just after a ditch leading onto a path running beneath a short row of cottages.

Follow the path for a short distance approaching a further gate.

Beyond the gate the path runs past the front of a row of cottages.

Past the cottages there is a lane. More or less adjacent on the far side of the road there is a stile leading into an overgrown patch of land.

This is another semi-preserved stretch of canal. Overgrown and largely filled in, it now provides a path and a rough and ready ad hoc nature reserve.

Carry on walking straight ahead along the path for quite some distance. Soon you come to a stretch where the side of the former canal is still edged with concrete, and it is more apparent what the wide ditch to your right once was.

Approaching a road bridge you carry on straight ahead.

On the far side of the bridge you follow a track across a field, past a house on your left, approaching a wooded bank.

Reaching the trees you cross a stile and carry on up a steep flight of steps.

At the top of the steps you are beside the busy A610 once more. Here turn right and walk alongside the carriageway along the verge for a short distance. Look out on the far side of the road for a footpath sign.

Coming level with the footpath sign, taking care, cross the road and clamber over the crash barrier on the far side. Here there is a corresponding set of steps leading downhill into dark woodland.

On reaching the bottom of the steps walk straight ahead, following an evidently recently conserved section of the old canal cut.

Soon the path becomes more overgrown. When I walked the route in July 2024 there was even a substantial tree blocking the path which I clambered over with some difficulty.

Eventually you reach the end of the track. Here turn left and head up a short slope to a path running along the bottom of the embankment carrying the A38. Down a steep flight of steps to your right lies the western portal of the Butterley Tunnel. This nearly three thousand metre long tunnel collapsed in 1900 severing the Cromford Canal into two. Despite this mishap parts of the tunnel remain in reasonably good condition, with a unique wharf section beneath the Butterley Ironworks now being a scheduled ancient monument.

Carry on along the path past the A38 embankment and a plant hire centre.

Soon you approach a road next to a tall concrete bridge which carries the road beneath the A38.

Here, turn right and walk beneath the bridge.

Immediately after the bridge on the left there is a track running uphill. Turn left and head up this track.

Soon on the left there is a narrow snicket bound by two tall wooden board fences which you turn down.

Follow the path for a short distance. Presently it leads out onto the platform of the Midland’s Railway Butterley heritage routes terminal station.

Once on the platform turn left and walk a short distance to a crossing over the line. Here turn right and cross the line heading for a stile down onto a path on the far side.

On the far side of the stile carry on walking straight ahead. Soon you reach the side of the Butterley Reservoir. Still owned and managed by the Canal and River Trust, it was once a feeder reservoir for the Cromford Canal.

Here a short flight of steps on your left take you up to beside the Butterley Reservoir. Once beside the water turn right.

Walk straight ahead following a path around the reservoir.

Upon reaching the far side you reach a small car park which you cross.

Here there is a lane off to the left. Turn left and walk along it, entering a residential part of Butterley.

Walk straight along the road.

Reaching a main road you carry on straight ahead passing the remains of the Butterley Ironworks which operated in one form or another on the site between 1790 and 2009. In its latter year’s casting parts for the Falkirk Wheel and Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.

Just past the ironwork remnants cross the road making for the mouth of a road leading towards a new housing estate.

Here there is a ramp on the right which you can walk down to reach the former entrance to the oldest part of the site including a gatehouse which is thought to have stood when the site was attacked during 1817’s Pentrich Revolution.

This is where the walk ends

Getting Back

At the time of writing in January 2025 numerous buses including “The Nines” services between Derby and Mansfield called at a stop immediately outside the remains of Butterley Ironworks. “The Nines” were especially frequent, stopping half hourly throughout the week. The stop was also served by the less frequent, roughly hourly by the 90 between Mansfield and Ripley, every 90 minutes Comet service between Derby and Chesterfield, and the 141 four times a day between Matlock and Ripley.