Monday June 10, 2019

Once again the birds woke me at the crack of dawn. Nikki and Chris left on their vacation to Anglesey, Wales – big hugs all round.

Our plan was to visit Bakewell, another lovely market town and then spend time with my nephew and his partner Caroline. Joy was to be our tour guide for the day and Caroline my nephew’s partner was going to be the historian.

Joy drove us through Chatsworth Estate which is an Estate owned by the Duke of Devonshire. The gardens are beautiful and are usually open to the public for free. This particular week-end the Royal Horticultural Society had their Garden show at Chatsworth, the price to enter was 38.00 pounds per person. We photographed the grand entrance and the house.

We carried on to Bakewell a lovely market town and the market was in full swing. We had a lovely wander around and treated ourselves to new bags.

Shelley tried the famous Bakewell Tart and didn’t like it. Joy bought one so that we could share it for dessert. We stopped in a pub on our way to Wayne and Caroline’s. I had my first beer of the trip. Unfortunately the weather was wet and drizzly, we didn’t stay too long in Bakewell.

We carried on to Wayne and Carolyne’s they live in a Village called Stoney Middleton. which is near the village of Eyam. We could have walked over the hill to Eyam, but it was cool, wet and windy.

The Village of Eyam is famous for being a “plague Village”. In 1665, Eyam was one of the first Villages in Derbyshire to be struck by the Plague. A haberdashery shop had ordered cloth from London and it arrived with rat fleas on it who infected the lady of the house. Within days people were dying from the plague. The rector of the church held a meeting and it was decided to quarantine the village. On the outskirts of the village there was a mound where the people of Eyam would leave money and their shopping list for the people of Stoney Middleton who providee them with food and necessities.

Some of the houses have plaques outside in their gardens indicating how many people died from the family.

There is a ‘Pilgrim Walk in this area – not quite the Santiago de Compostela, it travels from Illam to Eyam incorporating a lot of the Saxon churches and plague villages. Part of the path is from Stoney Middleton that we could have taken and seen the ‘mound’.

During the summer a lot of the villages in the area have well dressings this is to commemorate the quarantine of the villages and the survival of people. They create beautiful flower friezes.

Carolyne was amazing with the information on Eyam, she has discovered lots of interesting stories which she told us with great gusto.

After Eyam church she suggested we go to Tideswell Church. The Tideswell Church is again an old church dating back to the 1200. This church had knights and their ladies buried inside of the church.

One of them had damaged  arms and the other had lost his legs. Wayne and I were giggling “she’s ‘armless”, “He’s had a few too many drinks – he is legless” We had to leave the church in case we got struck by lightening.

By 6:30 we were fading fast and headed home. We finished off leftovers from the buffet and had a relatively early night.