Wonders of the Peak

Buxton Museum & Art Gallery

Buildings & Architecture

Orient Lodge

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At one time there was a rather grand house in Green Fairfield.

Orient Lodge stood on Hardybarn Lane, a long single track running from Waterswallows Road.

Built in 1896 for Samuel Swann Brittain and his Arabic wife Emma there are accounts of the grand house of Orient Lodge employing dairy staff, farm workers and servants.

The Brittains landscaped their estate from open farmland with formal gardens, mature trees from Ashwood Dale and overseas. There are tales of an orangery filled with exotic fruit trees, beautifully built stables for a stud farm and shippons with luxuriously tiled interiors.

However quarrying began at nearby Tunstead in 1929 and gradually expanded, moving closer to Orient Lodge.

By the mid 1930’s a family called Bingham owned the estate and had already sold part of the land to I.C.I.

Robert Bingham kept the house on until he died in 1977 before its inevitable sale to I.C.I.

All that remains now is an overgrown tree lined driveway leading to a great cliff edge to the huge Tunstead quarry.

Read more about the Brittains and the Binghams at Orient Lodge on our Buxton Museum and Art Gallery blog:

Orient Lodge

 

A Short History of Chatsworth House

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Chatsworth House, 1836, T. Allom. [DERSR: 40229]
If you turn to face the low wall, you should be able to see one of the sides of Chatsworth house peering over the top. The house has gone through many changes since the first house was built on the site by Bess of Hardwick and her second husband William Cavendish in 1549. They bought the manor for a sum of £600 which in today’s money is around £165,000. The construction of the original house began in 1552, but the only surviving and complete structure from this period is the Hunting Lodge on the top of the hill.

Cavendish died 1557, and after another marriage which ended in her husband dying in 1565, Bess married for a fourth and final time to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. When he was appointed the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I, between the years 1569 – 1584, Chatsworth also served to keep Mary a prisoner. Her rooms on the east side of the house are still called the Queen of Scots Apartments today, even though the rooms themselves are much changed.

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Chatsworth Hunting Tower

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‘The Hunting Tower at Chatsworth’, date and artist unknown. [DERSR: 41428]
Completed in 1582 for Bess of Hardwick and designed by the Elizabethan architect Robert Smythson, the unique Chatsworth Hunting Tower stands 400 feet above the House and on the edge of Stand Wood. It is the most impressive survivor from the period and an incredible example of Elizabethan architecture.

Built either as a banqueting house or a summerhouse, the Hunting Tower was also used by the ladies to watch the hounds whilst hunting, as the name suggests. It also gives views of the deer park. The Tower’s panoramic views are breath-taking and look out onto the park designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown for the 4th Duke during the mid 1700s.

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Views of Haddon Hall

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Exterior etching of Haddon Hall from the mid-nineteenth century by Samuel Reyner. [DERSR: 41316]
Ahead of you, up the track, lies Haddon Hall. The house is considered one of the best preserved examples of a Tudor hall. It has appeared in the films ‘The Princess Bride’ and the 2005 adaption of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ along with other productions.

The hall has long been popular, featuring in a series of engravings and prints from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Etching of the Drawing Room. Date unknown. [DERSR: 41258]
The origins of the hall date to the eleventh century where it was occupied by William Peverel, possibly an illegitimate son of William the Conqueror, before passing to the ownership of the Avenells during the reign of Richard I. It was then occupied by the Vernon family in the 1200s where it remained until a scandal around the youngest daughter of Sir George Vernon who eloped with Sir John Manners (the second son of the first Earl of Rutland). Dorothy Vernon and John Manners then began the Manners family at Haddon Hall.

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Saxon Ruins in Bakewell

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Etching of Bakewell and the surrounding view. Date unknown. [DERSR: 41438]
The peaceful and picturesque market town of Bakewell sits along the River Wye and is the birth place of the famous ‘Bakewell Pudding’. Whilst there is a strong indication to support the presence of much earlier settlements, Bakewell was founded during the Anglo-Saxon period, along with neighbouring villages Tideswell and Eyam. An early variation of the name also appears in the Doomsday Book.

There is evidence of a Saxon church in Bakewell which dates to 920, but the present church dates to the twelfth century in a typical Norman style, of which only the front and west parts of the nave survive today. The rest of what you see before you now was built in the early thirteenth century, with an assortment of restoration taking place in the nineteenth century.

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