Kenneth Rowntree, The Ashopton Inn, c1940. V&A Museum, London.
Ashopton, a small place, was well known to excursionists and climbers, and mention of its inn was almost always followed, in the old guide-books, by the words ‘well recommended’. It had a name, The Snake, but it was customarily called ‘The Ashopton Inn’ to distinguish it from another Snake(1) not far away and even handier for the ascent of Kinderscout.(2)
The inn, the chapel, the Toll Bar House, two farms, and six or seven cottages – the whole village, in fact, as well as the road from Sheffield to Glossop – lie now beneath more than 100 feet of water.(3) A solitary survivor, the seventeenth-century Pack Horse Bridge, was taken down and marked, stone by stone, for re-erection over the River Derwent at Slippery Stones.(4)
Faint in the background on the right of the drawing can be seen the sheer wall of Bamford Edge.(5)
Kenneth Rowntree, Smoke Room, The Ashopton Inn, c1940. V&A Museum, London.
With its hard benches, iron table, solitary and insufficient ashtray; with its dart-board, stuffed trout,(6) and commercial almanack; with its rubbed wall, courageous wall-paper, and closed window, this corner of the smoke-room was unusually rewarding. Many a man, relying on his early memories and not having used his eyes since leaving the impressionable age, may think this parlour typical. It is rapidly ceasing to be so. Even in villages it is being replaced by something shinier; or, awaiting that day, is being smartened up.
Appreciation of how many stories, relief of how many itching bites between the shoulder-blades, rubbed and discoloured that dado? How many good times were had by all? So one might go on; but of all the drawings in the collection this, perhaps, may most confidently be left to speak for itself.
Recording Britain, Vol 3, Derbyshire, p 26-29.
Image: Kenneth Rowntree, A.R.W.S.
Text: Arnold Nottage Palmer
1. This was The Snake Inn, which gave its name to the Snake Pass, the road that crosses the Pennines and connects Sheffield and Manchester. Years later, it was renamed The Snake Pass Inn, after the road to which it had originally given its name. The pub was permanently closed in 2019.
2. Kinder Scout is a moorland plateau and the highest point of the Derbyshire Peak District.
3. The entire village of Ashopton was demolished in the early 1940s and then flooded to create the Ladybower Reservoir. For more on this see Vic Hallam’s Silent Valley: the story of the lost Derbyshire villages of Derwent and Ashopton now submerged beneath the Ladybower Dam (1987). This reservoir is one of three in the Upper Derwent Valley, through which the River Derwent flows. The others are the Howden Reservoir and the Derwent Reservoir. The latter was one of the sites used by 617 Squadron to prepare for the Dam Buster raids in 1943.
4. The bridge, which already had a preservation order placed on it, was rebuilt and reopened in 1959.
5. Bamford Edge is an overhang of gritstone rock, situated near the village of Bamford.
6. Returned now, perhaps, to the depths from which it came.