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All roads find this old market town among green hills and lovely dales, and a famous company of people all these roads have seen.
King Charles I himself, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and men with fame outlasting kings and princes; James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, the poet Thomas Moore and the novelist George Eliot, the 'compleat' angler Izaak Walton, Congreve the dramatist, Canning the statesman, and that most astounding Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau--all these knew the lovely roads to Ashbourne, for all of them lived or stayed here, and these authors wrote here or put this country in their books.
Ashbourne Hall, where Prince Charles Edward stayed on his journey that was arrested at Derby, has lost its greatness; only part of it still stands, and that it now a public library. But below the steep marketplace is the old inn, The Green man, and Black's Head, visited by Dr Johnson's Boswell. Here, the landlady gave the Scot a low curtsy and an engraved sign of her house; and a sign still swings on a beam stretching right across the road.
In Church Street, one of the finest in Derbyshire, are groups of old almshouses, and the Elizabethan Grammar School, founded in 1585, is unaltered as we see it today - its gables all in a row, its windows with their leaded panes. Facing it (and now the headmaster's house) is the 17th century brick house to which Dr Johnson came for many a holiday with his old schoolfellow, John Taylor. Dr Taylor was rector of Market Bosworth and of St Margaret's at Westminster, and was also a prebendary of Westminster Abbey, but he loved his farm and his garden here. Though winter found him in London, summer brought him home again. Boswell tells us that he was like a hearty English squire with the parson added. One can get a peep of the gabled south front of Dr Taylor's house, with its projecting room (added by the brothers Adam) from the bridge over the Henmore Brook flowing at the bottom of the garden.
The grounds have changed very much since the days when the Duke of Devonshire arrived to dine with the doctor, and the coachman was ordered to drive twice round to give him a good impression of their size.
Of the two friends, Dr Johnson was the first to die, two months after leaving Ashbourne in 1784, and it was Dr Taylor who read his burial service in the Abbey. Four years later, they laid Dr Taylor to rest in the famous church of Ashbourne, where he is buried in a vault in the south transept, far below the magnificent steeple which abundantly deserves its title of the Pride of the Peak. It is a noble spectacle rising above a churchyard magnificent with yews and cypresses, and with a splendid avenue of 50 trimmed limes on each side. One of these cedars spreads its branches over a patch of ground 80 yards round.
Thousands come to Ashbourne for its monuments, but even without them it would be a place of pilgrimage. It has a few Norman stones but the church as we see it is the work of our three great mediaeval building centuries, a place of gracious charm without and within. A tiny brass plate in the south transept chapel records its consecration in 1241. A large and luminous place indeed it is, as Boswell tells us in his Life of Samuel Johnson. It is built in the shape of a cross, with chancel, transepts, nave and aisle gathered about its central tower, and it has magnificent arcades of lofty bays.
In the chancel is a recessed tomb, said to be that of Robert de Kniveton who died in 1471, and near it is a tomb with sculptures in memory of Christopher Harland, who died in 1839 and was the last representative of the Knivetons. Battered and worse for much moving about are the 15th century figures of John Bradbourne and his wife, who must have known Robert Kniveton; they lie in the north transept with the great array of monuments to the Cokaynes and the Boothbys.
The most famous monument here is however that to five year old Penelope Boothby, a life-size figure in white Carrara marble, carved by Thomas Banks in 1791. Penelope, who lies asleep, is said to have been able to speak in the four languages inscribed on her tomb: Italian, French, Latin and English.
In the lovely country round about Thomas Moore lived for about four years. In a cottage at Mayfield, beyond the Dove in Staffordshire, he wrote his famous Lalla Rookh, a fantasy of oriental splendour, and the bells of Ashbourne Church which inspired his lovely lines.
Ashbourne is famous for its traditional game of football, played in the streets and around the town on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. The game, in which the ball can be kicked, carried or otherwise transported is played between the 'Up'ards',and the 'Down'ards', i.e. those living on either side of the Henmore Brook, which runs through the town.
Ashbourne, like Bakewell can claim fame for a foodstuff. Ashbourne Gingerbread, a ginger shortbread with an unusual flavour, came to the town from France with the 300 French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars who were billeted here. The recipe has been passed from baker to baker down the years.
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