The stream of its delightful dale comes down to join the Wye as it leaves Millers Dale for Monsal Dale, flowing through a chain of lovely limestone ravines.
It has a fine stone Hall and pleasant houses built here and there on steep and densely wooded slopes. Its woods are a glory of lilies of the valley in spring, and all its ways are rich in lovely views.
We find it at one end of a most charming mile where the Wye winds like the letter M, deep down in a narrow gorge shut in by rocks and woods, a mile of beauty which come suddenly to earth with the textile mills at each end.
An intrusion of industry into romance were these mills,and it is odd that the Cressbrook Mills were owned by one who could make them prosper and be a poet too. He was William Newton, the carpenter-poet whom Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, christened the Minstrel of the Peak. Perhaps it was the poet in him that gave his little apprentices more kindly treatment than most boys suffered in the cotton mills then.
Burial mounds on the hills around tell the story of long ago. In a barrow on Hay Cop above the dale was found the skeleton of a child.
