This expanding village must have had a great share in Tutbury's pageantry, for such near neighbours are they that as we stand on the five-arch 19th century bridge spanning the Dove with one foot in Tutbury, and one in Hatton, we look up to the ruins of the castle crowning the wooded hillside.
Hatton saw the rising of the noble castle walls in Norman days and their dismantling in the Civil War; saddest of all its memories was the passing this way of Mary, Queen of Scots, to be a prisoner there.
It has known the days when a treasure chest was thrown into the Dove while Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, was fleeing from the castle with the king's men after him; and it has known the excitement of finding some of the treasure a hundred and fifty years ago, when 100,000 silver coins were picked up in the gravel of the river-bed near this bridge. Some of them are now in the British Museum in London.
|