Learning About

The Learning and Discovery Team provides high quality education services. Contact the team on 01433 620373 or email us

“Visiting Dovedale ~ Past and Present” : A Sustainable Tourism Project


A Sustainable Tourism project in Dovedale involving the Peak District National Park Learning and Discovery Team, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery Cultural and Community Services and sixty Year 7 and Year 9 Gifted and Talented students of Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Ashbourne, supported by their teachers, took place through Spring 2011. Another 30 Year 8 Gifted and Talented students enjoyed a linked Art project in this limestone valley, popular with tourists since the C18th.
The project culminated in an exhibition at the National Trust’s Ilam Hall Visitor Centre and was supported by the Trust’s Community & Learning Officer for the White Peak Area.
Anna Rhodes, Assistant Collections Officer at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery was very enthusiastic about the project and says “I really like the linking of old with the new, it adds a relevance to the Museum collection and shows the bigger picture”.

This project encouraged the students to empathise with the conditions faced by tourists/travellers like Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe and James Croston before the C20th improvements to roads. The physical conditions of unsurfaced tracks scattered with potholes, especially in winter, deep enough to overturn a stage coach, terrible weather in the uplands and only sketchy maps, put people off travelling far. Local dialects may have been difficult to understand, and without a guide there was a serious chance of getting lost and perishing or being robbed and abandoned in remote, wild places.
In spite of these dangers tourists, writers and artists came to Dovedale, inspired by the dramatic landscape and thrilled by the challenge. Often written descriptions and interpretations in paintings and engravings may seem wildly exaggerated to us but may accurately represent the feel of Dovedale to earlier visitors.
This extract describes James Croston’s view of the environs of ‘Ilam Rock and Pickering Tor’ in 1876;
 “Now the dale contracts, the rocks close in, and the river, pent up within a narrow gorge, rushes down with angry force, foaming, roaring and splashing on its way...Further on we have to creep cautiously round walls of perpendicular rock ...then as we approach the northern end of the gorge, Pickering Tower [which he mistakes for Ilam Rock], an immense obelisk-shaped pillar of rock, that has been riven from the neighbouring mass, and now juts out into the bed of the stream, is seen guarding the outlet on one side; and the Steeples [now known as Pickering Tor], two detached columnar pinnacles that rise perpendicularly from the craggy slopes, stand sentinel-like on the other.”    
                   
Students walked the length of lower Dovedale to compare the C18th images and written descriptions with the contemporary landscape and recorded their personal impressions in a variety of ways including field-sketching, descriptive writing, landscape character analysis and photography and took the opportunity to demonstrate their map-skills.
They later worked as teams to produce Dovedale guide booklets written in a contemporary style and in style reminiscent of past times. These examples were available at the Ilam Hall Visitor Centre exhibition in May.
A linked project, the 2011 “Pictures in the Landscape” exhibition, also ran in Dovedale from 22nd April to the 2nd May. Dovedale became transformed into an open-air picture gallery.
Ros Westwood, Derbyshire Museums Manager, is led a guided walk of Dovedale on 30th April, following in the footsteps of the writers, artists and scientists who have been inspired by this landscape –  including (amongst many others) Izaak Walton, Smith of Derby and Lord Byron.


The event was organized by the Peak District National Park Learning and Discovery Team.

T: 01433620373

E: learning.discovery@peakdistrict.gov.uk