Twenty Trees Photography

Maps

Maps

Ref: Castleton010-Small

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Castleton Map

I travel through Castleton four times a day ferrying children to and from Hope Valley School. I've also been there as a tourist many times, visiting the Medieval Fayre or the castle, or walking the hills that surround it.

Its an old place Castleton, full of little alleys, and twists and turns. The shape of the map changed often as it evolved, as I did more fieldwork, discovered more routes and rivers. Adding the stations was relatively straightforward although it was more a question of what to exclude rather than include with Castleton itself having so many shops, pubs, houses with names and places of interest. The history of Castleton, and the present, includes the Bronze and Iron Age monuments on Mam Tor, the castle's Norman builders, rope-makers in the Devil's Arse, caving in the numerous caves, mining and a unique limstone landscape with its own flora.

Fortunately, in addition to the fieldwork, the Castleton has a very good Visitor Centre that was a huge help enriching the map.

Bronze and Iron Age Monuments

Mam Tor, the Shivering Mountain (I once, in the Visitor Center, overheard someone ask where it was!), was used by Bronze Age settlers as the location of two barrows, marked as tumuli on the OS map. A further barrow is located on the ridge west of Mam Tor, known as the Lords's Seat, after William Peveril, the eponymous castle builder's habit of using it to sit on whilst watching the hunt. Barrows are Bronze Age burial mounds, of which there are around two hundred in the Peak District, though few more northerly than these. Mam Tor was used in the Iron Age as a place to live. The banks and ditches of the fort still being easily visible.