Denby is in the Domesday Book (as Denebi, meaning Village of Danes), but I didn't know that. And John Flamsteed, the very first Astronomer Royal, was born here, in 1646, but I'd not heard of him.


But Denby has produced, in its time, sizeable quantities of coal, clay, and ironstone. So now we're getting closer to familiarity, because if you know the name, it's probably through its association with Denby pottery.

It seems a bed of clay was uncovered in 1806, during the construction of a turnpike road from Derby to Alftreton. The landowner leased the clay bed to William Bourne, whose son opened a pottery, called Joseph Bourne and Son, in 1809. It sounds as if they were a pretty innovative and flexible bunch, managing to negotiate changing needs and a war, among other challenges. It ceased to be a family business in 1942, but has carried on regardless.

And did you know that Denby can claim to be the place where tarmac was born? Yes, when we first read that, we thought: Surely not? What about John McAdam? Isn't he the tarmac guru?

But it seems the story is true. McAdam did indeed invent a crushed-stone surface, but he didn't perfect the technique for making it stick. Which, in the dawning age of the motor car, was a bit of a drawback. Enter Edgar Hooley, a surveyor for Nottinghamshire County, who happened to be visiting Denby in 1901, and noticed a smooth stretch of road near an ironworks: "He asked locals what had happened and was told a barrel of tar had fallen from a dray and burst open. Someone had poured waste slag from the nearby furnaces to cover up the mess. Hooley noticed this unintentional resurfacing had solidified the road -- there was no rutting and no dust. By 1902 Hooley had patented the process of heating tar, adding slag to the mix and then breaking stones within the mixture to form a smooth road surface. Having perfected the operation, Hooley began transforming road surfaces and Nottingham's Radcliffe Road became the first tarmac road in the world... In 1903 Edgar Purnell Hooley formed Tar Macadam Syndicate Ltd and registered Tarmac as a trade mark."

Aside from all this, Denby is a lovely little place, which we've really taken to. First, there's Denby Village:



This has a beautiful old church, St Mary the Virgin, parts of which date back to the early 1100s:





Denby Village also has a nice pub, called The Denby Lodge. They do two lunchtime mains for GBP 16, which is pretty good as things go these days (and it was here I discovered Diane sauce, an excellent invention featuring mustard and Worcestershire sauce).



You can walk from Denby Village to Denby Pottery (the views are great, but the route is something of a work of art these days, as the former track is now private property, so you have to detour through the fields, and then find your way -- not without difficulty -- round the solar farm):



There's a network of little villages round Denby. The roads are fairly quiet, and most have footpaths, so you can walk without getting too muddy if that's what you want to do. And they're all connected by handy buses, which is another plus.






So that was all very close to home.

What else have we done? Ah yes, IKEA:


Then there was a garden centre near Matlock where we felt right at home:


And we enjoyed visiting The Hanger, a charity "superstore" in Alfreton (no exaggeration -- this place is BIG):


Very pleasant round here. Very pleasant.