Using my DH Lawrence interactive "Map of World Travels" to plan a bike/walk tour of local Lawrence hot spots
The route meanders through the delightful wooded countryside around Kimberley, Watnall, Felley and Annesley that he loved to escape to. It's 15 miles around but can be cut short. The DHL "points of interest" (POI) on the route are described in the article below. Learn about the life and works of DHL and get fit at the same time! It's also the perfect chance to discover his often unappreciated mastery of writing about the natural world.
Powered by my Interactive World Map of DHL's Travels
You can follow the route in real life or using the online, virtual, interactive Lawrence map which shows all DHL's places of interest locally and around the globe in timeline order. Places he visited, places he lived with period pictures, quotes from his letters and background info. With his hatred of anything up to date or techie, I'm sure Lawrence would have hated the map but hopefully you'll love it!
Click and learn all about DHL's extensive worldwide travels, zoom in and click the "red phoenix" markers for photos, dates and quotes from his writing inspired by the places he visited. Like a latter-day budget backpacker he was always short on cash and often in poor health but his compulsion to travel pushed him and wife Frieda ever onwards and they stayed in some extraordinary places.
That map is available to browse by clicking here. Or download it as a KML/GPX to use with other apps. It works great in Google Earth, the pictures and writing are easier to read.
Our local route is circular and is shown as the red line on the map with points of interest as DHL's "red phoenix" symbol. As you read the article, click any of the links in the text to bring up the map then click the "red phoenix" POI for more info incl. dates, quotes from DHL's books about the spot and pictures. You can then follow the red line along on the interactive map, clicking on each "red phoenix" you see along the way for more information and quotes. The walk takes us from Kimberley to Felley woods near Annesley and the views to the Annesley hills over the countryside that DHL loved are stunning... "The valley was full of corn, brightening in the sun. Two collieries, among the fields, waved their small white plumes of steam. Far off on the hills were the woods of Annesley, dark and fascinating..." Sons and Lovers.
We start at Kimberley GNR railway station (Great Northern Railway) where DHL caught the train into Nottingham every day for over 5 years to get to Nottingham High School, his work at Haywood's surgical goods factory and the university. He'd already walked the 2.5 miles (or about 50 mins) from home in Eastwood and would walk the same back again each evening. Walking such distances was not unusual back then if you wanted to get anywhere.
 |
| Kimberley GNR station & signal box by Malcolm Parnham |
We carry on over the GNR station footbridge and head down Brewery Street towards the redeveloped old brewery buildings and turn right alongside the cutting of the Midland
railway line just before the brewery's bridge. The Midland trains actually ran from the Langley Mill and Eastwood station on a branch line but were much less frequent than the GNR with a change of train required and their terminus in Nottingham was not convenient, hence the reason for DHL's long daily walk. Why didn't he cycle? There's evidence he owned a new bike aged 15 in 1900 (very unusual for a miner's son²) but we also know he enjoyed a good long walk².
Next we go past the old Kimberley
Brewery tower of Hardy and Hansons where the beer was brewed for the local pubs and the
thirsty miners. The Sun Inn in Eastwood was a Hanson's pub and served Kimberley Ales mild and bitter, a much loved pint. The brewery has been sympathetically redeveloped for housing. Then a quick detour up to the information board by the old brick railway bridge, built when the cutting was dug in 1877 so Mr Hanson could continue to get his brewery by horse and carriage.
Up Hardy Street on Alma Hill we get to the ruined windmills of Lawn Mills, Kimberley (or "Keston" as it was called in Sons and Lovers) with lovely rural views over the valley towards Eastwood.
This was DHL’s
route back home from Kimberley station over the fields. Paul Morel shared a
moment here with Clara in Sons and Lovers (SL), click here then the "red phoenix" on the interactive map for the quote. On the far side of the
valley is the site of (sadly recently demolished) May Holbrook’s house used for secret meetings with Frieda in the
early days of her and DHL’s romance and their base for walks over the fields to Giltbrook and Watnall Woods.
 |
| Lawn Mills, Kimberley |
Next we go through Watnall Woods (2 low stiles to carry bikes over or detour via Woodpit Cottage) and along Narrow Lane towards High Park Woods and Felley, following the route of Barber Walker colliery company’s private railway line linking their pits to Watnall wharf and described so beautifully in the opening of SL (click that link above for the quote!) The Brinsley end of the railway features in DHL’s short story Odour of Chrysanthemums and Brinsley pit is where his father worked.
At the small car park by the woods, go briefly round the corner for a view down to Beauvale Priory (featured in A Fragment of Stained Glass and “the ruined priory of the Carthusians” in SL) before heading into the woods. The monks lived a hermit-like existence of silence and solitude in their individual lodges rarely even socialising with each other. Food was delivered through a hatch.
 |
| The solitary monks of Beauvale Priory |
Hidden nearby are two old gamekeeper's huts inspiration for that of Mellors the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley. One is at Robin Hood’s Well (also mentioned in SL’s opening pages), the other is the old gamekeeper’s lodge in the grounds of Beauvale House ("Highclose"). Both are now ruins, gradually melting more into the forest each year.
Our first view of DHL's beloved Haggs Farm, home of the Chambers family³, comes next before we dip under the M1 motorway and follow the route of the walking party in The White Peacock (WP) from the Haggs up towards Annesley Hall’s old fox hunting kennels. The Kennels and nearby quarry and limekilns are the culmination of a dramatic scene in WP. Next we go onto the atmospheric ruins of Annesley Old Church and Hall (“The Hall” in WP)
 |
| Haggs Farm by Betty Gill |
We cross back over the motorway and are treated to extensive views over Felley, Haggs
Farm (which always retained a cherished place in DHL's heart), over towards the Warren and to Eastwood Bottoms which was DHL’s
usual walking route to the Chambers’s Farm. We drop down the steep hill to the Felley
Mill dam, millrace and pond ("Strelley Mill" in WP) which was the setting of the mill in the 1960 Sons and Lovers film.
 |
| Beauvale House |
Next is Moorgreen village ("Willey Green") and the location of the scene in WL where Gerald thrashes his horse in front of Ursula and Gudrun at the colliery level crossing
 |
| The old Ram Inn |
Turning off right opposite the Horse and Groom pub you can visit the site of May Holbrook’s house used by DHL and Frieda for secret meetings early in their romance. Further along is The Old Ram Inn. In WP, the Ram Inn was the home of Meg the barmaid, who George Saxton carts off (literally) to the Registry Office in Basford one fine morning.
 |
| Harvesting the corn by Sue Baber |
Back on the main B600 road towards Kimberley, (part of the original 1758 Nottingham to Newhaven Turnpike road) is Greasley Church and Vicarage ("Minton Church" in SL, "Greymede" in WP) and home of the much-lampooned Baron Skrebensky in The Rainbow and the pompous Baron von Ruge in The Merry-Go-Round. Both are based on the real-life Rev. "Baron" Rodolph Von Hube, vicar of Greasley during DHL’s time. The church was also the scene of the Crich's wedding at the start of WL. The board by the steps has a buttoned-up picture of a young DHL looking, as local author Tom Cox's dad succinctly puts it, "like a stuck up twat"⁵. Even Lawrence himself thought that in his 21st birthday picture he looked like "an intellectual prig".
The fields behind Greasley church are where DHL fondly remembers harvesting corn with the Chambers boys and which inspired Love Amongst the Haystacks. Next door is Greasley Castle farm, called "Castle Farm" in SL where Paul Morel and his friends laze in the summer grass. The medieval farm is built on the site of Greasley Castle, Sir Nicholas de Cantelupe's HQ. He was the founder of Beauvale Priory in 1343.
 |
| Holy Well |
The ride is 15 miles mostly on easy tracks and quiet roads. Off road sections are gravel forest tracks with a short bit of dirt track/footpath just in the woods at the top of Narrow Lane. You can avoid the worst bit by sticking to the main path around the side of the woods by the motorway. A couple of sections are on footpaths so please be considerate to walkers. There are a couple of low stiles to negotiate in Watnall Woods or you can detour down through the woods to Woodpit Cottage and cycle up the B600 road to avoid them. Here's a link to a GPS version of the route to download to a device.
1 - His "girlfriend" was Alice Dax, the liberated young wife of an Eastwood chemist. She was a radical free-thinker and a committed Suffragette, "free of the conventional mores inherited in different degrees by Jessie Chambers and Louie Burrows" (former girlfriends). They began a passionate affair around November 1911 and in October of the following year she gave birth to a daughter Phyllis Maude, choosing names suggested by Lawrence himself. Alice herself said the child would "never have been conceived but for an unendurable passion which only he [Lawrence] had roused and my husband [Harry] had slaked'.
Notes
We know he was in the Dax's Shirebrook home as he sent a postcard from there dated 19th August 1911 to another girlfriend Nellie Holderness in Eakring. It said, with typical Lawrence candour, "I have got here but had to bike - not a single train. It is an awful fag. Shirebrook is a most hideous place - I contrast it with Eakring. Keep well - love to all - DH Lawrence."
In July 2019 his postcard to Nellie sold at auction for £1800. The interactive map reveals the full story here. Click the Shirebrook POI. He also writes a postcard to Louie Burrows. He's a popular chap with the ladies right now and fit enough and keen enough to cycle the 35 miles round trip to Shirebrook. There is a rail strike on though! It is a hilly route too with around 600 feet of climbing each way. Not bad on an old single gear bike. He must have been keen. Road surfaces were not generally tarmaced either. They would have had a fine gravel finish. So then, we have DHL pioneering two current cycling trends, the single-speed gravel biker!
In March 1910 Alice Dax had travelled down from Eastwood to visit DHL while he was working as a teacher in Croydon and they went out to a concert together. The following day a guilty letter was sent to his current girlfriend Jessie... "I was very nearly unfaithful to you. I can never promise you to be faithful. In the morning she [Alice Dax] came into my room, you know my morning sadness. I told her I was engaged to you. But it is all finished now with her - there is no more sitting on the doorstep." Their relationship was by no means finished though as his cycling trip to Shirebrook shows. Alice was keen to keep matters very much active. From her own admission (in a letter to Frieda in 1935) she was also in vehement reaction against men, and she had sworn vengeance on her father’s sex, rushing into marriage with “the first who offered” with the intention of wreaking her vengeance. She confessed to Frieda in 1935 that her love for Lawrence was one of the forms of that revenge against the male sex and a husband she did not love. (from D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter ; a study in Edwardian transition by Delavenay, Emile)
Bicycles were a major trend by the dawn of the 20th century, and hundreds of patents for gear sets had been filed by this point. However, the average cyclist still used a single-speed, owing to the difficulty in manufacturing reliable gears and the tedious nature of changing them. As technology advanced, the hub gear emerged. This self-contained unit contained all the gears and necessary components for advancing through several speeds on the bike. Throughout the early 1900s and up until about 1930, hub gears became the dominant form of bicycle, overtaking and displacing single speeds but there's no evidence what type DHL had. Perhaps he was still using his 1900 bike? See note 2 below. In August 1910 in a letter to another female admirer Grace Crawford "My sister, who is tall and slender and twenty three years old, has cycled to the theatre in Nottingham with her sweetheart." If his sister could cycle to Nottingham why not DHL? The bike in the title picture is a 1900 Singer (that's not really DHL standing next to it by the way!)
2 - DHL biker and hiker... Around 1900, when DHL was 15, one of his cousins (W.E. Lawrence), not unfortunately a reliable witness, also remarked how Bert Lawrence ‘was one of the first boys in Eastwood to have a nice brand new bicycle; he was the envy of all the other people in the village’. It's possible he may have meant DHL's brother Ernest who certainly was a cyclist and won competitions on his bicycle. If true then it shows the Lawrence family had enough spare money to buy a new bike, an unusual thing for a miner's son to possess.
In Croydon during his teaching years, DHL toured Surrey on his bicycle "a most sweet and lovely country". Around the same time he also wrote to fiancee Louie Burrows who was living in Quorn, Leicestershire of his intention to cycle to Quorn and Leicester presumably when back visiting from Eastwood (and not from Croydon!). We also know he cycled up the steep hill to Heanor in a letter here. Even bike mishaps were no problem for DHL. While staying at a friend's cottage in Hermitage, Berkshire in 1919 a day's biking to Buckleberry Common suddenly goes wrong... "...the lunch was very good, and I sat back and listened while the two intellectuals [DHL and Joan Farjeon] soared up into the heavens until it was time to start homewards. We got away quite well when suddenly there was a ping, and to my horror the chain had broken and dropped off my bike. With some miles to go, it was a bit disconcerting and looked like being a long tramp push. Then Lawrence suggested that if I could mount he would push me on the straight and I could coast down hill, which is what happened, and we arrived back tired but whole." [Nehls i p.502]. His older brother Earnest was a fine sportsman. When he worked in Coventry for a short time he would come home to Eastwood every weekend on his bicycle [Nehls i p.13]. DHL was a big fan of playing charades. Dorothy Brett recounts a cycling charade from a party in her London flat in December 1915 "We play charades — what fun they are. You trotting round the room riding an imaginary bicycle, ringing the bell, crying in a high falsetto voice, “Ting-a-ling-a-ling!” and running over us all."
DHL's long walks were not an unusual thing for many of his contemporaries. After his first meeting with Frieda in Sherwood he thought nothing of walking the 8 miles (nearly 3 hours) back to Eastwood. He tells Jessie Chambers of his day's walking while visiting her at Haggs Farm around 1901 "I’ve been to school and walked to the station and back and up here, and I’m not tired." (c.10 miles of walking).
In later years he also sometimes biked up to Haggs Farm.. "But after a restless weekend the desire to see Miriam [Jessie] again would become too strong, and when mother saw him wheeling his bicycle down the garden path she would say bitterly, “So - he couldn’t keep away after all his talk about not caring.”. When he and Jessie split up when he was 25 he wrote to her... "A man can do so many things, he reads, he paints, he can get across his bicycle and go for a ride, but a woman sits at home and thinks.” and in 1906 when their final split came she writes "I began to expect Lawrence soon after midday, but the afternoon passed, and when at last he wheeled his bicycle through the big yard-gate he was not the Lawrence of the night before."
In Twilight in Italy he delightfully chronicles his "backpacking-style" tour across Switzerland starting on the Uberlingen ferry in Germany before (mostly) walking clean across the Alps to Lake Como in Italy. He would have loved this literary ramble which covers many of our local Lawrence POI's and plenty more besides. Even in his later years, often blighted by ill health, he loved to walk and his easy walking style is described by an American visitor to his house outside Florence in 1927... "It was a rough walk of some two miles from the end of the tramway. Lawrence, ill as he was, went to town rarely. When he did, he walked this distance with his long easy stride."
3 - In an unusually nostalgic letter to Jessie Chamber's brother David in Nov 1928 he writes about Haggs Farm... "Whatever I forget, I shall never forget the Haggs - I loved it so. I loved to come to you all, it really was a new life began in me there. The water-pippin by the door - those maiden-blush roses that Flower [the horse] would lean over and eat - and Trip [the bull-terrier] floundering round - And stewed figs for tea in winter, and in August green stewed apples. Do you still have them? Tell your mother I never forget, no matter where life carries us. - And does she still blush if somebody comes and finds her in a dirty white apron? or doesn't she wear work-aprons any more? Oh I'd love to be nineteen again, and coming up through the Warren and catching the first glimpse of the buildings. Then I'd sit on the sofa under the window, and we'd crowd round the little table to tea, in that tiny little kitchen I was so at home in."
4 - His travels are nicely summed up in this video "D. H. Lawrence's travels and his quest for more authentic living here shown in a documentary segment. Shared for educational purposes. No copyright infringement intended. This segment was originally uploaded in 2010, but I wanted to bring it back. Pardon sound quality. I have visited many of Lawrence's haunts around the globe, from Mexico to Cornwall, London to the Midlands to New Mexico. His journeys may inspire you."
5 - A walk to Bogend with my dad https://tom-cox.com/countryside/a-walk-to-bog-end-and-back-with-my-dad/
6 - Robert E. Gajdusek, ‘A Reading of The White Peacock’ in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale, Ill., 1959) pp. 188–203.
Key
WP = The White Peacock
SL = Sons and Lovers
WL = Women in Love
Picture credits - Local paintings by local painters Malcolm Parnham and Geoffrey Russell Beard. Malcolm Parnham's fabulous paintings can be seen and purchased here https://www.theparnhamgallery.co.uk/ and Geoffrey Beard's are available on the local Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/400986200022386/search/?q=beard
Other pics from DHL Digital Pilgrimage https://thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com/tag/family/; Facebook Kimberley and Eastwood Bygones Sue Baber https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10158350634512041&set=g.400986200022386; Betty Gill;
Sources:
Another excellent mapping resource for DHL is Buxi Duan's interactive map which also has links to many Lawrence reference books, his letters and biographies
Comments
Post a Comment