Magpie

Travel Guide

Travel BookTrail style to Sophie Draper’s Derbyshire

This is a remote and vast area of the world! Spooky and chilling when Sophie Draper invents  a cottage beside the sea and surrounded by woodland and takes you there for a stay with her family of characters. The house is made mostly of glass and the wife of the novel is not too impressed:

“I was never quite sure about this house. It’s not a house, it’s a barn. A great, vast tomb of a place, all gleaming sleek lines and huge panes of glass. Very beautiful, very impressive, but not a home. Not at first, not to me.”

The scenery however is something else:

“All that space, the mod cons, the view – that amazing aspect over the valley. It’s Derbyshire at its best, lush and verdant with the reservoir glittering at the bottom of the fields. And the privacy.”

Then there’s the sunken village:

“Several buildings were submerged in the creation of the reservoir, most notably the church of St Bertram’s. It caused a considerable stir when it reappeared in 1918 as the result of an unusually severe drought. The whole project had taken over fifteen years to complete at the turn of the century and was later redesigned to serve the growing populations of Manchester, Derby and Nottingham.”

The village is fictional but is based on very real sunken villages such as Ladybower Reservoir which was once a village.