I visited Gibbet Moor in Derbyshire three times in the winter months of 2012 and 2013, looking south east at a deserted moorland. I saw few people over that period. What I was looking at was, in fact a historically populated Iron Age lanscape.
According to English Heritage; ‘one of the most extensive and well preserved Bronze Age settlement complexes in the Peak District . It provides an important insight into Bronze Age settlement, agricultural and ceremonial use of the Derbyshire East Moors.’ In contrast to this description, Daniel Defoe wrote in the 1720‘s, about Gibbet Moor above Chatsworth; ‘ as a vast extended moor or waste, which for fifteen or sixteen miles together due north, presents you with neither hedge, house or tree, but a waste and howling wilderness’.
Gibbet Moor drawing in progress
