Distance: 2.2 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from Creswell in north eastern Derbyshire to the nearby Welbeck Estate just over the county boundary in Nottinghamshire. The walk from Creswell station ends at the part of the Welbeck estate where the Harley and Portland Galleries are situated.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
Underlying The Dukeries Garden Centre
Welbeck Abbey in northwestern Nottinghamshire was secularised in the late 1530s when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of England’s monastic orders. The land came to be possessed by a son of Bess of Hardwick, famed for her tight grip upon the Cavendish family’s holdings in Derbyshire, extending their reach east across the county boundary. In time this scion became the Dukes of Portland, while the Cavendish’s they were descended from became the Dukes of Devonshire.
In this regard it is akin to Newstead Abbey in the western centre of the county, famed for its connections to Lord Byron. However, unlike Newstead Abbey which passed through the ownership of relative minor aristocrats, and industrialists, prior to coming into the ownership of Nottingham City Council where it remains. Indeed after the construction of Welbeck Woodhouse a second stately home in the Abbey grounds in the 1930s there are now two grand houses on the estate both occupied by different segments of the same family.
These houses and their 15,000 acre estate stands at the western extremity of a part of Nottinghamshire long nicknamed “The Dukeries” for the fact that four major ducal estates (historically belonging to the Dukes of Norfolk, Newcastle, Kingston and Portland) border each other.
This concentration of land ownership by major aristocratic families, unusual in England, may be some remnant of the extensive medieval royal holdings in Nottinghamshire, that created Sherwood Forest, and forms an important backdrop to the Robin Hood myth.
The Dukeries part of Nottinghamshire remained fairly isolated and sleepy into the 20th Century, well under the thumb of the four aristocratic families that owned the land. Then in the 1920s in quick succession a large number of major coal mines were sunk into the local sandstone to reach the coal measures formed over hundreds of millions of years beneath them. A small amount of oil was also found, the duke on whose land it was prospected, is the only private individual in the country who owns an oil reserve, due to the find predating the nationalisation of the UK’s oil reserves.
Industry in the form of coal minings coming to The Dukeries did not necessarily immediately change the area. For at least a generation after the major pits were sunk miners continued to live in ducal owned villages (including Creswell), policed by company security who cracked down on attempts to form trade unions and undertake other forms of worker organisation too. Auspiciously, this level of domination extended to the 1926 General Strike and its aftermath when every other part of the UK’s coal industry ground to a halt Nottinghamshire’s mines remained working. The situation did change after 1946 when the coal industry was nationalised, removing it from the control of Nottinghamshire’s dukes, and life in the area’s coalfield, including support for the Labour Party, came to more closely resemble that of elsewhere in the country’s coal mining areas.
Since the mid-20th Century like all landowners and farmers, the owners of the Welbeck estate (the last Duke of Portland died in 1990, but the family’s wealth persists in the hands of other relatives) had diversified their income stream, no longer relying solely upon rents and royalties from resource extraction. These days, while Welbeck Abbey and Welbeck Woodhouse remain private homes off limits to the general public, part of the estate close to Creswell Crags just over the county boundary in Derbyshire, has been turned into a cultural and retail park.
The cultural element of the development comes in the form of two art galleries: The Portland Collection, which comprises artworks from the holdings of the Portland family, collected over the course of 400 years, and the Harley Foundation, a contemporary gallery focused upon exhibiting and producing new work, especially work inspired by craft practices. Two impressive examples of the rural art gallery. Another cultural element with a more heritage focus, are the bizarre tunnels which the eccentric and reclusive 5th Duke of Portland ordered constructed beneath the Welbeck estate in the mid-19th Century. These unusual constructions are now celebrated as a quirky element of the site’s history.
Retail at Welbeck comes in the form of several cafes, a farm shop, brewery and distillery, as well as the Dukeries Garden Centre. The latter enterprise is by far the largest component of the retail attractions at the site, hordes of plant buyers and conservatory regarders descending upon it at weekends and on bank holidays. Its name appears to hark back to the days when this part of Nottinghamshire was under intense aristocratic control, while the Welbeck Estate, today marketed for its sustainability and stewardship of the land, stretches all around it.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
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This walk from Creswell to Welbeck Abbey begins from Creswell Railway Station.
Upon exiting the station down the access road turn left and head to the bottom of Creswell high street. Along the way you pass this former coal mining village’s impressive, now disused, brick art deco cinema, a row of impressive red brick shops from around the turn of the 20th Century, and the town’s Anglican church set back amidst a graveyard. Creswell in its current form came into being in the 1890s and 1900s when a colliery was first sunk there by the Bolsover Colliery Company, a firm which while amongst the largest in the country at the time, had the Duke of Portland who owned the land on which the mines were dug as a major shareholder.
At the bottom of the high street turn right and walk out through Creswell’s suburbs.
Off to the left pick up a bridleway which runs past a riding school housed in an old farm complex.
Beyond the riding school the bridleway turns into a greenway running uphill in woodland.
Follow the track around as it runs through woodland at the top of a low ridge, working its way around the edge of a major sandstone quarry. A vast processing plant can be glimpsed through the trees, as can the coal measures exposed by the quarrying activity.
Soon you cross a road, and carry on along the bridleway on the far side, this leads you to the tree lined car park of Creswell Crags.
Soon you cross a road, and carry on along the bridleway on the far side, this leads you to the tree lined car park for the spectacular, and pretty unique in the UK, Creswell Crags, famed for their prehistoric remains which reveal a lot about the ice age and early human settlement in Britain.
At the car park turn left, picking up a wide bridleway track, heavily used on the weekend day I walked the route.
This soon leads to a main road, next to a gatehouse type structure, and a wide avenue of trees running deep into the Welbeck Estate towards Welbeck Woodhouse and Welbeck Abbey.
On the far side of the road pick-up a path to the right which winds its way across a field and through some ornamental woodland to reach where the Harley Foundation Gallery, Portland Gallery and the Dukeries Garden Centre are situated.
Getting Back
To get back from the Welbeck Estate either retrace your steps to Creswell Station from where there are trains hourly throughout the day Monday – Saturday, north towards Worksop and south towards Nottingham. At the time of writing in March 2025 there was no Sunday service. At the time of writing there was also the Stagecoach 209 bus, every two hours throughout the day till early evening, Monday – Saturday and bank holidays, running between Worksop and Edwinstowe, that called at a stop on the A60 just outside the entrance to the Harley Foundation, Portland Gallery and Harley Foundation.