Old Glossop: the original village

Old Glossop is the original settlement. The town most visitors see — Norfolk Square, the mills, the streets running down towards the station — came later, and was for a long time a separate place with its own name.

The old village

Old Glossop sits on a south-facing hillside at the north-eastern edge of the present town. It grew around a market cross and a parish church, and it was once the centre of a vast, scattered, mountainous parish. The old village held a market and a fair as far back as 1290, under its first market charter.

From 1157 until the late fifteenth century the manor of Glossop belonged to Basingwerk Abbey in North Wales. The monks marked the bounds of their holding with crosses set around the district.

The cross

The cross standing in the village today is probably not the one from the market charter. It is thought to date from the sixteenth century, when the area was leased from Basingwerk by the Talbot family, and to have replaced an earlier cross raised after 1290. It marked the centre for the fair and for celebrations — the wakes and the rush carts gathered around it.

Why the town moved

Early in the nineteenth century a second village grew up alongside Glossop Brook, below and to the south-west. It was called Howardtown, after the principal landowner, Bernard Edward Howard. Norfolk Square was laid out in 1837, and the commercial life of the district settled around it.

That is how the names came to be as they are. The new town took the name Glossop; the original became Old Glossop. Being left behind is exactly why the old village survived: its stone cottages, its lanes and its cross were never redeveloped, because the money and the growth had gone elsewhere. It is now a designated Conservation Area, and the quieter, less altered part of the town.

The edges

The ground east of the village is where this site tends to concentrate: the brooks, the mill sites, and the land between the houses and the moor. Hurst Brook — also recorded as Scotland Brook — powered Cowbrook Mill from 1801, and the pattern of leats, boundaries and rights of way around it is still legible if you know where to look.

Those boundaries are not merely historical. Access arrangements agreed generations ago still govern how people reach their homes here — a right of way granted by my grandfather from Cowbrook Avenue through to Sheffield Road is still in daily use — and they are worth recording accurately while the people who agreed them can still be asked.

Sources

The market and fair of 1290, the growth of Howardtown and the Conservation Area draw on High Peak Borough Council’s Glossop Conservation Area Character Appraisal. The dating of the cross and its association with the Talbot lease follow the Glossop Heritage Trust archive. The Basingwerk Abbey holding is recorded in the Wikipedia articles for Old Glossop and Glossop, Derbyshire.