Meeting Bob

It's funny how things turn out.  I like to take a photo or two when I go out on my walks around the town but short of a pink shoe on a wall there wasn't anything that inspired me today.  I missed a turn off on my route which would make the walk shorter so deviated towards the end and headed home from a different direction than I intended. I'm so glad I did. 

There was an old chap at the top of the lane near our road who said hello and remarked on the view. We got chatting and he said he was born in Dronfield 74 years ago. I said he must have seen some changes in that time. What followed was a delightful local history lesson. 

He told me that the place we were standing used to be called Scrater's Lane, scrater's being an old word for 'at the bottom of the tree' as in 'very poor' and the lane is where the poorest people of Dronfield used to live.  Here's a picture of the lane now.  Behind the hedge to the left of the photo are a few large detached houses. It's quite a little secluded enclave and so very different to how Bob remembers it.

 

There's a house at the bottom end of the lane called The Monkey House and I have vivid memories of pushing the girls in their prams up there and stopping to look at the cage of monkeys they had in the garden. The house is under different ownership now, has been spruced up and the monkeys are long gone. People usually think we are making it up when we tell them about it, it was very strange thing to have in the middle of our small town.

Bob walked me to the top of the lane which is adjacent to the top of our street and told me that our road used to be a field with horses. Bob grew up with one of my neighbours Frank, and he remembers when one of the horses bit Frank on the chest when he was around 7 years old. Amazingly Frank now lives almost on the exact same spot so I guess he wasn't too traumatised by it.

 

There are two really old cottages at the top of our road that I must have passed a thousand times over the past 30 years. I knew one used to be a local shop as someone pointed out the thick glass windows in the wall which were serving windows. What I hadn't paid attention to was the boarded up window and door and the dilapidated shop sign which were still there. The sign said 'SMELTS', and if you get really close up to it you can still see the faint outline of the writing.I'd walked passed it so many times and just not seen it. I can only guess my focus was on the post box when going down the hill, and on looking forward to getting to the top of the steep hill when climbing up it! It just goes to show that looking at things from a different vantage point from normal can be quite revealing. Here's what is left of the shop now turned into two cottages. The cottages are privately owned and it's a wonder that the owners haven't bricked the old frontage up by now.  I'm really glad they haven't though and hope that future owners leave it too as a sign from an almost forgotten past.

I was such a pleasure to meet Bob, as much for it being unexpected as for the stories that he told me.   I learned a little more about my locality and  got my interesting photos in the end.