Stanley Village - Part 2 - To Klondyke And Back
w/e 27 August 2006
All this week's pictures were taken with a Kodak DX6490

This second part of our monthly series looking at Stanley Village picks up the walk at the former Bridge Inn which is now a private dwelling called Bridge Cottage (right) and continues along Derby Road to its junction with Morley Lane. From here we will make our second detour from the main route through the village by turning left into the lane to follow it to the far end and the area known as Klondyke before we retrace our steps back to Derby Road. At the corner of Derby Road and Morley Lane is the White Hart public house which is as good a place as any to commence this part of the trail. The Bridge Inn as we know has been converted into a private dwelling but the White Hart at some time in its life experienced the opposite conversion beginning life as a row of cottages. A former landlord by the name of Mr. Fred Crooke virtually transformed the inn into a hunting lodge which was frequented by members of the Earl of Harrington Hunt when hunting 'meets' were held there.

Not far from the White Hart, just a little way into Morley Lane is the Methodist Chapel. This was built about 1882 and was traditionally a hive of activity on Whit Sunday each year when the Sunday School Anniversary was celebrated. It must have been a wonderful sight to see the procession from the Felix Bus Garage at the far end of the village to the Brickyard (seen in Part 1 of this series) in its heyday. Even the chapel organ featured in the procession being transported by horse and trap.

Our route now takes us along Morley Lane, today an eclectic mix of old and new properties but which was little developed until the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. It is possible though to find views such as this where time appears to have stood still.

At a bend in the road, Morley Lane is joined by Common Lane, the only direct link by road to Stanley Common, part of the same parish as Stanley Village but in reality a separate entity, that does not mean leaving and re-entering the parish. But we need to keep left at this road junction to reach the area known as Klondyke. The houses here were built by the Derbyshire Kilburn Colliery Company with bricks made at their 'footrill' colliery (drift mine) at about the same time as the Klondyke more usually associated with the Gold Rush of 1896.

Back at the Derby Road end of Morley Lane we can see brickwork from even earlier as it is believed that the wall around the grounds of Stanley Hall came from a row of thatched cottages that stood there until the early 1800s. Only tantalising glimpses (right) over the wall and through the bushes and trees that surround the nineteenth century building can be seen from the adjacent road.

There is a better view of the barn at the Hall from further on in our walk where it is obvious that no expense has been spared in the tasteful renovation and modernisation of the building and its conversion into a private residence. The Hall itself though has a dark episode in its history for it was here that it witnessed a brutal murder back in 1842 when Miss Martha Goddard was battered to death. Three men from Heage were found guilty of the murder and were publicly hanged in Derby in 1843. An account of the murder which is not for the squeamish may be read on Alan Bloor's Stanley "One - Place" Study website - click here. And at that gruesome point we'll leave this part of walk around Stanley but will continue our look at the village when we resume at the Morley Lane/Derby Road junction (right) near the White Hart in Part 3.  Back to Part 1  Forward to Part 3

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