Country Images Magazine Derby Edition December 2017 | Page 22

The Lost Houses
of Derbyshire
by Maxwell Craven
Joseph Wright’s An Iron Forge from Without, 1773
[In the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg]
Hurt’s ironworks, Ambergate, by Henry Moore of Derby 1811.
[Derby Museums Trust]
Th e site was originally part of the Hurt family’s
Alderwasley Hall estate – indeed, that fi ne house,
now a special school, but erected in 1790, is
perched on the hill top not very far away. In the
1760s, the family, ever enterprising, started an
iron works in the valley bottom; certainly it was
up and running by 1775 when Joseph Pickford
ordered iron grates for some of the fi replaces at
Kedleston Hall and balusters for Robert Adam’s
bridge over the lake when he was clerk of works
there.
22 | CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk
One thing that marked Francis out in this
enterprise was that he, as a major landowner, was
making a considerable investment in the iron
industry at a time when most gentry families
were content to lease works on their estates to
professional ironmasters at a fi xed rent. Hurt, on
the other hand, was acting as entrepreneur and, as
with his family’s lead mining enterprises, taking
the profi t. Th e original Ambergate forge did not
survive beyond 1794 before being completely
rebuilt, but vestiges of the original blast furnace,
Francis Hurt of Alderwasley Hall, founder
of the iron works, by Joseph Wright.
[Derby Museums Trust]
Cromford Mill, the Overseer’s house, 2007
[M. Craven]
set up on the earlier site, were visible amidst the
sprawl of Johnson’s wire works at Ambergate
until they were destroyed in 1964.
A substantial stone house was also built for the
forge manager, Forge House, across the river
in Alderwasley parish at the foot of Shining
Cliff woods, but alongside the works, probably
designed by George Rawlinson of Matlock
Bath, a friend of Pickford’s and who seems to
have worked extensively for both Sir Richard