Hey Blog! In this post I will elaborate on the hint I gave you yesterday – this post is all about Aqueduct Cottage on the Cromford Canal.
The cottage is a lockkeeper’s cottage, and is rather old – it was built around two hundred years ago by the Nightingale family, when they added an arm on the Cromford canal to take materials from the mills up the valley down to the main canal. If you were thinking, “Nightingale? Like Florence?” then you would be absolutely right. It’s the same family – apparently Florence Nightingale was friends with at least one generation of inhabitants! Little Grey Rabbit author Alison Uttley also knew it, but all that was about a hundred years ago – the last tenant left in the ’70s and the cottage later fell into total disrepair. Now, however, a team of volunteers from the Wildlife Trust are renovating it to its former state. They seem to have done a very good job – from 2016 when there was no roof, trees were growing through the walls, and the floor was buried a foot deep, there is now a tidy clean cottage with a fully built roof. They’ve practically built it from nothing – just a few bits of the walls were already there!
We were meeting friends there, and Mum wanted to talk to the restorers, so she could run a Wildlife Watch session there, but since Dad had taken the car and it was a long way to walk, we cycled! I need to do some more cycling, a) because it’s fun and gets you where you want to be faster than walking, b) if on the flat or downhill with less effort (lucky the canal is almost spirit-level flat!), and c) because Dad wants to cycle Land’s End to John O’Groats and for that I need lots more practice! The longest bit of the journey was getting the bikes out of the garage and straightening the handlebars (to put them away, Dad usually moves bits of them so they fit), but once on the towpath we could go quite fast!
The history of the cottage is very interesting. Originally, it was a square plan one roomed layout. It was then extended to make two semidetached cottages, and then knocked through to make one big one. There was also a very small walled garden out the back, which the renovators only learned about after a former resident told them about it! We didn’t see that bit, but inside upstairs are diagrams and old photos of the cottage and people that lived in it. As I have said, the cottage is owned by the Wildlife Trust. It is situated in Lea Wood, a lovely wood with a lot of different habitat and wildlife. The fact that the old canal runs along the bottom means that there is a lovely blend of history and nature – just like me! I think it’s most definitely worth a visit if you live nearby.