Hope's End

The valley is closed at its lower end by the reservoir, whose construction at some point in the past drowned around forty acres of older settlement. A framed map of the valley hangs above the dartboard at The Rail and Reservoir showing villages that now exist only as names on the chart. Their names are not given in the text.

The valley road runs roughly along the contour, with the older village buildings clustered on the gentler southern slope. The High Street carries the small concentration of village commerce — the post office, the village green and its churchyard, the pub. Behind and above this strip of frontages, terraced stone houses climb the slope on a small network of lanes; Haversage Road is one of these. The valley walls above the buildings turn quickly to open hill-grazing; the lane out at the head of the village climbs steeply onto the moor.

Above the village, the high ground is The Ridge: a walked spine of moorland from which the valley unfurls behind the walker in patches of green, grey and the dark of evergreens along the field boundaries. This is the country in which much of the family's and the saga's outdoor business is conducted.

The foundation of Hope's End is traditionally fixed at 926 AD, in the immediate aftermath of one of the more obscure but consequential military engagements of King Æthelstan's northern campaign. Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great and arguably the first king of all the English, had inherited a kingdom whose northern frontier was contested by a loose coalition of Scots, Strathclyde Britons (the ‘Celts’ of later chronicle), and Hiberno-Norse Vikings out of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. The 926 campaign — the precursor to the more famous Treaty of Eamont Bridge of July 927, by which the northern kings formally submitted to Æthelstan's overlordship — was the consolidation of West Saxon control over the Mercian and Northumbrian fringe, of which the central Peak District was a contested edge.

The engagement remembered in Peak District folklore as the Battle of Hope was fought in the wide ground of the Hope Valley below the twin peaks of Win Hill and Lose Hill. The local tradition surrounding the two hills — that two armies camped on each, that whoever held the higher and more defensible position would win and whoever held the lower would lose, and that the hills are named for the result — in the Aethereal Stories universe attaches specifically to this engagement. Æthelstan's main force, dispatched north from Mercia, engaged the coalition's main body on the valley floor near the village of Hope. The opposing army had positioned its main encampment on Lose Hill.

The high plateau west of Mam Tor — the future site of Hope's End — was the geographical key to the engagement. Two roles were assigned to its garrison troops by Æthelstan's commanders. First, the plateau commanded the only practical route by which the coalition might be reinforced from the west, through the ancient passes connecting the central Peak to the Cheshire plain; holding the plateau meant blocking those passes and preventing relief from reaching the coalition's main body. Second, and decisively, the plateau commanded the head of Winnats Pass — the only route by which the army on Lose Hill, if defeated, could escape westward toward the open moorland and the Cheshire border. To hold the plateau was to close the western gate.

The battle's outcome on the valley floor was a West Saxon victory; the Lose Hill army broke, and the survivors fled west, away from the pursuing main force and toward the perceived sanctuary of the moors beyond. They were funnelled by the ground into Castleton and then up into the limestone cleft of Winnats Pass, climbing under fire toward what they assumed was open country at the top of the gorge. The garrison on the plateau was waiting. The fleeing army was bottlenecked in the steep, narrow gorge between Æthelstan's pursuing main force at its eastern mouth and the garrison troops blocking its western head, and was, by the chronicler's account, completely destroyed there.

Hope's End originates, on this reading, as the permanent garrison post established on the plateau after the battle, to ensure that the western route from the Hope Valley could not be re-opened by any future hostile force. It was, in the most literal sense the saga's name allows, a defensive roadblock: a settlement whose purpose was to prevent the survivors of any future fight in the Hope Valley from escaping into the western moor.

The garrison post itself appears not to have survived in any continuous form after the Norman Conquest; the plateau passes through the medieval and early modern periods as a few scattered farmsteads on the limestone shoulder above Castleton, with the original Saxon position decayed into anonymity. Hope's End as a distinct settlement is re-founded, on most internal accounts, in the early eighteenth century as a lead and Blue John mining venture.

The geology of the immediate area is rich. Blue John, the rare blue-purple variety of fluorite, occurs in commercially significant quantities only in the small area of Treak Cliff above Castleton; the showings at Blue John Cavern and Treak Cliff Cavern have been worked from at least the seventeenth century. Lead has been mined throughout the surrounding limestone country since the Roman period; the Odin Mine, immediately east of Mam Tor at the foot of the Pass, was one of the most productive lead mines of eighteenth-century Derbyshire. The Hope's End venture, founded by speculators in the 1730s on the prospect of finding similar mineralisation along the limestone-shale boundary of the plateau, was intended to be a third such workings — a parallel operation to Odin and Treak Cliff exploiting what the speculators believed was the same vein system at higher altitude.

The venture failed. The mineral veins on the plateau were thin and irregular; the shale interbeds in the limestone were unstable; the workings could not be kept dry without continuous pumping; and the cost of moving ore down through the gorge to Castleton, before the road was metalled, was prohibitive. By the 1770s the principal investors had withdrawn. The mineral processing buildings, the miners' cottages, the chapel, the dam at the lower edge of the workings and the small reservoir behind it were left in place. The remaining miners and their families stayed on as a small hill-farming community, taking work as casual labour on the surviving lead mines below, walking the gorge each morning to and from the Odin and the Speedwell.

The reservoir at the lower end of the village — the forty acres now flooded behind the dam, with older settlement drowned beneath — descends from this period; the dam was built to serve the mining works, and remained in place after the workings closed. The framed valley map above the dartboard at The Rail and Reservoir still shows the villages and workings that lived on the drowned ground beneath the present surface of the water.

Through the nineteenth century, Hope's End persisted at a small scale: a hill-farming village with a primary school, a chapel, a post office and a pub, dependent on its connection through Winnats Pass to Castleton, Hope and the wider Hope Valley. The opening of the Hope Valley Line railway in 1894, with a station at Hope, improved the village's accessibility from Sheffield and Manchester without bringing significant industrial activity to it. The closure of the A625 through Mam Tor in 1979 made Winnats Pass the only motor route in or out of the village from the east, with the consequence that even by the mid-twentieth century the village remained much smaller and more isolated than its proximity to two major cities would normally produce.

The population by the 1990s is small and ageing, with the primary school running on diminishing numbers and the post office under perennial threat of closure. The village is, in the framing of the saga's opening chapters, the kind of small Peak District village whose only obvious distinguishing feature is that, in its entire post-Conquest history, almost nothing has happened in it. This is partly the point.