Parks Within the Park
The great landowning families of the Peak District stamped their authority on the landscape in the shape of elegantly landscaped parklands-and some of the best-loved stately homes in Britain.Whether your taste is for the palatial opulence of Chatsworth’s sumptuous state apartments, or the time-worn interiors of Haddon, where you could imagine you were still in the Middle Ages, the Peak’s country houses have something for everyone.
The houses have also had a significant effect on the landscape, for whole villages were uprooted to create the ordered, rolling parklands we see today.
In the case of Chatsworth, in the broad shale valley of the Derwent near Baslow, the two Saxon villages of Chatsworth and Langley were depopulated and another-Edensor-creasted in Capability Brown’s master plan for the estate. At Haddon, a couple of miles away in the neighbouring valley of the Wye, the village of Nether Haddon disappeared in the same way. But the parks provide superb settings for the houses themselves, and early writers marvelled at the way they had been won from the surrounding wilderness.
Herds of deer, red and fallow, add a living, moving spectacle to the whole scene at Chatsworth and Lyme Park, on the western edge of the Park near Disley.
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