About Derbys Ramblings

Derbyshire Ramblings - Walking in Circles Down The Derwent Valley - includes 19 new circular walks which take in the breadth, beauty and variety of the Derwent Valley.  However, this is no ordinary walks guidebook.  Walk Recorder Mike Warner, who created the walks, was accompanied on his journey by writer/photographer Ashley Franklin, and the result is a book chock full of whimsical yet interesting and informative prose complemented by Ashley’s stunning colour photos.

            Each walk is fully detailed with easy to follow instructions and a map, plus nature notes compiled by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust along with images of the area’s flora and fauna, taken by the region’s finest wildlife photographers.

            As they traverse the 55 mile Derwent Valley Heritage Way, Ashley explains how this valley changed the world and became a World Heritage Site.  As well as unearthing the valley’s rich history, Ashley treats us to his fascinating and funny musings on life, the universe and everything to do with walking.

            The walks take in: the beauty of Ladybower – the Lake District of the Peak’; the vista from atop Win Hill, Curbar Edge, High Tor and Riber Castle; the majesty of Chatsworth; the mystery of the Nine Ladies; the magnificence of the mills at Cromford, Belper, Darley Abbey and Derby; the grandeur of Heage Windmill; the splendour of the canals at Cromford and Shardlow; the lullaby that lurks in Shining Cliff Wood; and a silver birch wood so enchanting that if a fairytale princess had appeared astride a unicorn, no one would have batted an eyelid. 

            Along the way, Ashley delves into and discusses millstones, squeezer stiles, disappearing villages, hidden hydrangeas, bull baiting, sluggard waking, narrowboat living, walking as ‘gymnastics of the mind’, poets in motion, boots and blisters, Florence Nightingale’s slippers, Little John’s grave, canal restoration, cloud appreciation, countryside phobias, and why, without Milford, there would be no Manhattan.

In the course of compiling this book, I gathered fascinating quotes on the subject of walking - from Hazlitt to Hillaby, Kierkegaard to Wainwright.

In exercising the body, the question 'why walk?' has exercised the minds of walkers across the world and over time.  For me, as a walker who enjoys walking without relishing it, I find it a fascinating question.  Even for renowned walker John Hillaby, author of Journey Through Britain (about an eleven hundred mile walk from land's End to John O'Groats), it was an enigmatic and elusive question.  By the end of his mammoth walk, he seemed to have found his answer.  After stating that part of the journey would certainly have been done more easily by car, he wrote this:

'Roads are all more or less alike.  Walking is intimate; it releases something unknown in any other form of travel and, arduous as it can be, the spring of the ground underfoot varies as much as the moods of the sky.  By walking the whole way I got a sense of gradual transition from one place to another, a feeling of unity.'

A Latin proverb states simply: 'It is solved by walking,'  which the philosopher Kierkegaard expanded on when he wrote: 'Every day I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness.  I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.' 

As British historian and keen walker George Macaulay Trevelyan pointed out: 'I have two doctors, my left leg and my right leg.'  For Alfred Wainwright, walking was many things, including 'a balm for jangled nerves' or 'escape from the clamour and tumult of everyday existence.'  For William Hazlitt, there was the sheer exhilaration of walking: ‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner.'

Derbyshire Ramblings is available online, priced at £14.99.  Click here to order