peak district local history, customs, wildlife, transport

Visitors often remarked that ordinary homes in the Peak District were well built and in good repair compared with other parts of the country. The reason was simple: there was lots of stone available, close at hand so even humble houses were built of it. These little stone cottages would have needed less frequent repairing than cottages built of wood, or bricks or other man-made building materials.

When they did need repair, of course the stone was easy to get. The most local stone was used as far as possible. The limestone of the White Peak is not so good for building with as the gritstone but it was handy. People tended to use rough limestone for the walls but strengthened and neatened it with gritstone for the corners, window and door surrounds.

Stone was also used for roofs and floors. A special kind of thinly bedded gritstone was used for this purpose. It would split readily into smooth flat paving flags for floors and yards while the thinnest kind was used as roofing slates.

Wood was necessary of course for the roof timbers and plants also had other uses. You can see clearly when you look closely at 18th-century engravings that ordinary cottages were commonly thatched. Stone slates were the common roofing stone of the better properties. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Welsh slate gradually took over as the normal roofing material in the Peak as elsewhere in Britain.

A dry stone house would have been very draughty and plants were useful to fill up the gaps. Moss was much used for this purpose. The inside might be plastered and was finished off with a coat of whitewash made with the local limestone.

Visitors from elsewhere were fascinated by the ordinary housing of the Peak. It was unusual enough to catch the eye, as Thomas Browne observed when he had a look round Bakewell in 1662:

“Their houses are most of them built without any morter, stones heap’d upon stones make a substantiall wall, and by their owne weight keep one another fast and strong. They cover their houses with a slat, of which they have great plenty in most of their hills; their buildings are but low, and seem rather to bee naturall than artificiall.”

Taken from The Works of Sir Thomas Browne volume 1, edited by Simon Wilkins 1846

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Derbyshire Detail and Character by Barry Joyce. Derbyshire Libraries & Heritage. 1995