Back to limestone plateau

Today's Villages, Farms and Fields

Monyash is based around a Medieval market centre, Taddington is a planned Medieval village with a main street and parallel back lanes and Chelmorton has one main street with the fossilised strip fields to either side.

Most of the villages on the limestone plateau of the Peak District were planned Medieval settlements.

These were perhaps created by their respective lords of the manor, possibly with the willing co-operation of the local people, in order to introduce communal farming in large surrounding strip fields.  When this system of feudal farming was first widely established in the Peak District is not clear; a best guess is the 10th or 11th centuries.

The planned village of Wardlow, established on a fertile shelf in the Medieval period and surrounded by strip fields, which are now fossilised by walls. Farming may well have been practiced here since prehistoric times, but the intensive medieval use has removed all surface traces of this

The time of most radical change was in the 18th and early 19th centuries with the enclosure of extensive commons on the less well-used land between each of the villages.   The advent of communal farming, perhaps imposed forcibly, was a radical social departure with dramatic impact on the landscape.

Whether villages also developed because of the limited number of places with reliable water supply, is not currently clear.

Today's Peak District villages and farms are surrounded by a walled landscape of predominantly Post-Medieval times.

While villages are the dominant type of settlement in this part of the Peak District, there are also isolated monastic granges and Enclosure farms.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Back to top