North Lees hall

A late Elizabethan tower house built for WillIam Jessop in the early 1590s.  Charlotte Bronte visited in mid 1845 during a stay with a friend nearby.  She found the name Eyre comes here and her description of Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall is a rather accurate description of North Lees Hall complete with a mad woman who perished in a fire.

Fortunately the Hall now has central heating, electricity and running hot water although it retains the treacherous mode of elevation, a modern (but not very) replacement of an uneven wooden spiral staircase.  Derbyshire in December is a very cold place, it must have been very unpleasant here before these mod cons were available.

The trip here was uneventful apart from the usual Friday afternoon M25/M1 stop start traffic.  The aroma of a lovely monogrammed meat pie greeted us on arrival (see below) and a few glasses of wine got the party started.

The trip home however was a little more fraught as there was 4cm of snow on the car and thick ice on the road.  The first 5 miles of the journey were a nail biting slithering along narrow winding roads.  Fortunately Derbyshire's dry stone walls (and our car) survived.

Happy Birthday Phil.

I missed out on the Cutlery Museum and the underwater lead mine and spent Saturday stoking the fire and reading my book instead.  I braved the cold on Sunday to visit Buxton which would no doubt be lovely in the summer, or even in the winter on a sunny day but it is not at its best in the snow when you’ve lost your travelling companions and dont know how to read the map.  Fortunately good humour was restored by hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows.  Back to Hathersage via Bakewell where the difference between a Bakewell Tart and a Bakewell Pudding was revealed by the charming proprietor of the Bakewell Pudding Shop.  Back to North Lees Hall for a bit of a rest before the birthday dinner.