Relics of a Monument: Sketching Harboro Rocks
- Sidney Wilson
- May 12
- 3 min read
Harboro Rocks, a monument situated in Middleton, Derbyshire, with relics from the past scattered across the rugged landscape, mining foundations, neolithic imprints, and a cave inhabited as recently as the 18th century. For me, like Black Rocks in my previous journal entry, an artistic training ground.
It is accessed from a layby, through a divide in overgrown shrubs, paths trodden for millennia by people with many different motives to access this archaic site, to hike, climb, live, and worship ancient gods. There is a mineral processing plant positioned at the bottom of the hill which provides a distinct hum, over the years I've never seen any sign of life at the plant but that droning sound is everprescent which makes the atmosphere of the place more eerie.
The English writer and journalist Daniel Defoe, in his 1727 account 'A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain' wrote about his journey up through Derbyshire, stopping at Harboro Rocks, recounting a family who lived in the cave, the man providing for his family by mining for lead in various locations nearby. It's remarkable that people lived in this cave as late on as 1727, something which in Britain I would normally associate with the neolithic tribes that once occupied this territory thousands of years before.
This got me thinking, what if the Romans had explored Harboro Rocks like the neighbouring Rainster Rocks when their empire spanned all the way to Britain? So I imagined myself as a Roman soldier on an expedition, entering the cave, possibly tired and depleted of energy, on the edge in potentially hostile lands.
Also influenced by reading Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Terror of Blue John Gap', I imagined this Roman encountering, or thinking he is encountering something sinister in the rocks, possibly visions from over exhaustion from navigating the cold, damp and harsh terrain in Britain.
The rocks are jagged and point upwards on many of the sections, almost to say 'do not enter' but the commonly harsh weather of Derbyshire still invites you to go into the cave for shelter, cave is slightly damp, algae growing from the constant drizzle, offers a windbreak, no sign of life inside.
A memory burned in my mind is standing here in this graveyard of relics on a bitterly cold and crisp new years eve in 2014, the mist was rising and moving across the fields, being sliced by the wind turbines wailing in the distance, anticipation for what might come, contemplating insignifiance in the world, one last look at the landscape before the beginning of the next year.
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