Peak Experience

Getting married was an uphill struggle for the young men of Baslow!  They once had to climb the Eagle Stone, northeast of the village, before any young lady would accept their advances.  Climbing the stone won the men favour with the witches, so they would soon be able to marry.

 

The gritstone Eagle Stone stands proud, while the surrounding rock has eroded away.  Its name may come from Aigle’s Stone, one of the huge missiles flung by the pagan god Aigle.  Or it could come from Egglestone, meaning Witch Stone.  Today only climbers ascend, practising their skills.

 

Look for Bar Road and take the third path to the left to get to the Eagle Stone at SK263738.

 

Picture of Gibbet Moor

 

East of Chatsworth you will find Gibbet Moor where the last man to be gibbeted alive was punished for murdering a Baslow woman in her cottage nearby.  She still haunts the cottage.

 

When a tramp called asking for food, the woman refused, saying she’d no food to give idle people.  The man grabbed her frying pan and poured the sizzling bacon down her throat, scalding her to death.

 

He was sentenced to be hung in chains and left to die upon a gibbet erected on Gibbet Moor.  The man’s agonized screams so haunted the Earl of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth House, that the punishment was abolished soon after.

 

The victim’s ghost has been seen as recently as 1972 (at least twice).  Bonneted, elderly, she appeared at the bedside of a painfully sick man in the cottage, leaning over him.  He felt no fear.  The pain instantly went and he fell asleep.

 

Picture of Baslow Church

 

 

Every All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) William Cundy sat on the porch of St Anne’s church, Baslow, to see who would die that coming year.  And local legend claims you can still see this for yourself today, twice a year! Apparently on the third time of ‘watching the church porch on St Mark’s Eve’ in April, or Halloween in October, watchers see ghosts going into the church.  Those who will die remain in the church.  Those who will be sick but recover leave church after a time, proportionate to the duration of their illness.

 

Rumours soon spread that sick people would die because the watcher said so.  So mothers with ailing children and farmers with sick cattle went to William because of his special gifts.

 

William Cundy gave love philtres to lovesick men and women.  He studied astronomy and astrology.  Cundy once claimed villagers would find a lost child asleep under the Eagle Stone, with her bonnet beside her.  Which they did!

At St Anne’s church, Baslow, on School Lane, look just inside the main door on your left to find the dog whip. Churchwardens in the 1600s and 1700s were official ‘dog whippers’.  Before services they whipped all the dogs out of church.  The whip is about a metre long and attached to a short ash stick with a leather-bound handle.  The dog whipper got an annual salary of 8s. and 2d. for the job!