Dams and Reservoirs

 
 

Quenching the urban thirst

 

Reservoirs in the Peak

 
With the industrial revolution, people flocked to the cities and new sources of fresh water were urgently needed.  The northern town planners of the 1800s noticed the Peak District’s well-watered hills and hoped these would slake the thirst of growing cities like Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield.  Now you’ll find reservoirs filling many of the valleys running into the region.
 
Derwent Dam in full overflowDerwent Dam in full overflow  Seal of the Derwent Valley Water Board 1899Seal of the Derwent Valley Water Board 1899 
 
Walk the Thornhill Trail and imagine the Bamford and Howden Railway that once ran its course.  This railway transported 1.25 million tonnes of stone from Bole Hill quarry to build Derwent and Howden dams in the early 1900s.  When the water level in the reservoir drops you can still see the concrete or wooden piers that supported bridges across the valley.  Two towers rise over the dams, built in elaborate Victorian Gothic style with crenellations, arched windows and buttresses – beautiful in their own way.  The towers originally housed pumping equipment.  Nowadays you can visit the Dam Busters museum in one tower and discover the dams’ key role in the story of Barnes Wallace’s innovative bouncing bomb. 
 
Envisage life in Birchinlee, or Tin Town as it was known.  Tin Town was a makeshift village of corrugated iron buildings housing the itinerant navvies who worked on the Derwent and Howden dams.  These men were called navvies after the navigators who built the great canals in the 1800s.  At the height of construction of the dams, Tin Town housed 2,500 navvies and their families, the largest ever settlement in the Upper Derwent.
 

Access and orientation

The Howden and Derwent reservoirs are north of Snake Pass  (A57).  There is plenty of parking available at the national park information centre.
 
The Thornhill Trail (hosted by Moors for the Future - external link) is part of the Derwent Valley Heritage Way and can be reached from Heatherdene car park, north of Bamford on Ashopton Road (A6013).  You can see what remains of Tin Town from the Trail, west of the reservoir.
 
In the distance stands the massive dam . . . a sight worth seeing, especially when a high wind is blowing up valley, for then the spray is blown back from the crest of the dam, and rises to a tremendous height.
 
Extract from The Story of Birchinlee: a memento of 12 years in the workmen’s village, Derwent Valley Waterworks, Derbyshire, by George Sutton, 1914.