Look down the slope towards the Crescent.
Click the PLAY button to hear former local librarian, Lyn Morris, describe the last days of the Buxton Library in the Crescent.
Or read the transcript below:
Buxton Museum & Art Gallery
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Look down the slope towards the Crescent.
Click the PLAY button to hear former local librarian, Lyn Morris, describe the last days of the Buxton Library in the Crescent.
Or read the transcript below:
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Pause before you cross the Stepping Stones. Read out loud for your group:
You’ve discovered the Stepping Stones. They were brought here in the late 1800s. How would you have crossed the river before them? Remember to cross carefully, you don’t want to end up getting wet!
Turn left on the other side and head to the stile. Pause here and get the group to look for fossils in the wall.
Can you see fossils here at the stile? These fossilised creatures are called crinoids.
The picture above shows a fossil specimen in Buxton Museum’s collection. It’s full of crinoids too. They are sometimes nicknamed ‘Derbyshire screws’, can you tell why?
Cross the stile when you’ve finished fossil hunting and continue along the path, keeping the river on your left. After a little while you will take the stepped path up to the top of the hill.
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Built between 1887 and 1889 to directly rival the nearby Palace Hotel, the Empire Hotel was demolished in 1969. Rarely used as a hotel whilst it stood, The Empire was commandeered for military purposes during the First World War as the Canadian Discharge Depot, which had been previously located in Shoreham and then Bath. It had around 1,000 troops receiving medical attention at any one time.
Following the Second World War, the Empire Hotel never reopened and was occupied by squatters who were removed in 1949. The building fell into dereliction and was subsequently demolished in 1969. All that remains today of the Empire Hotel is the former gateway at the top of Carlisle Road.
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You should be standing by the ‘Silverlands’ street sign. Lots of evidence for the Roman presence in Buxton has been discovered in this part of town. There may have been a fort here, alongside a civilian settlement.
In 1862 the oldest inscribed milestone in Derbyshire was found at Silverlands – left behind by the Romans. The inscription reads ‘TRIB POT COS II P P A NAVIONE M P XI’ which translates as ‘WITH TRIBUNICIAN POWER, TWICE CONSUL, FATHER OF THIS COUNTRY, FROM NAVIO 11 MILES’. The name of the tribune who decrees that it is eleven miles to the Roman fort at Navio is missing from the inscription.
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On the skyline above the town, Solomon’s Tower marks the site of Grin Low Barrow, where people of the Bronze Age buried their dead.
The barrow was excavated in 1894 by local antiquarians William and Micah Salt.
It is carefully made of concentric rings of angled slabs. Inside were the remains of four human skeletons (A, B, C and D). Stone boxes (cists) protected the heads of burials A and B, and at D the remains were in a shallow rock-cut grave. There were also two human cremations (E and G). At E a cist held the cremated remains of a child along with a flint blade. The people were buried with a variety of objects. These include the teeth and burnt bones of animals, a pot, flint tools and a slate whetstone.
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Welcome to Lismore Fields.
It is now only 6,000 years ago and the landscape has changed. Many trees have been cleared out of the way and a rectangular building is under construction . A series of wooden posts have been driven into the ground to support a thatched roof of heather. The walls are covered in mud plaster. Small fields are being prepared nearby.
A new way of life is being practiced here. People have begun to make pottery, farm the land and tend domesticated animals like cattle and pigs. Some communities still follow the old ways, following the ancient paths through the landscape, but eventually the new ways of the farmers will become dominant.