A lost landscape with relics of martyrdom

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/padley-derbyshire-ruins-martyrs-chapel-manor

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It wasn’t quite midwinter spring, but the morning was unusually warm, the moors tucked up under blankets of thick grey cloud. Smoke from the chimney of the Grindleford Café rose in an unwaveringly straight line to heaven. Close by, the damp black mouth of the Totley Tunnel burrowed off towards Sheffield.

The coming of the railway changed this landscape’s energy, cutting off Bole Hill and part of Grindleford from the Derwent valley below. A line of terraced houses was built alongside the tracks, a blessing for the local wildlife on this December morning. A man leant against his back doorframe watching birds feeding in his garden while on the other side of the track I was walking, a crowd of tits and chaffinches combed a hawthorn.

Related: Country diary: Bole Hill, Derbyshire: Disused quarries are nature in rehab

At the end of the track is a much older dwelling, Padley Manor, or Padley Chapel as it has become known. It was, in the 16th century, in the possession of the recusant Fitzherberts. Two Catholic priests, Robert Ludlam and Nicholas Garlick (known as the Padley martyrs), were arrested there in 1588, and shortly afterwards cruelly executed at Derby in an act of religious intolerance. The manor, which reaches back to before the Norman occupation, was never the same again. Most of the largely 15th-century buildings were recycled, apart from the gatehouse, which had housed a small chapel and a bedchamber. The chapel was reconsecrated in 1933; an out-of-date billboard announces a martyrs’ remembrance service.

Behind the gatehouse is a jumble of ruins: the first step of a staircase that ends abruptly, the rough suggestion of walls. It should be possible to recapture this lost landscape, the old house cupped in the sheltering hand of the hills, the Derwent below, but I couldn’t manage it. English Heritage restored the site, and built a shelter whose retaining wall features random carved blocks, like architectural spaghetti soup. It captures the oppressive dissonance of the place. “History may be servitude, history may be freedom,” TS Eliot wrote. At Padley, it felt like the former.