|
This hill-top market-town, busy with hosiery, coal, engineering,and pottery, has more to remember than to see. It knew William Howitt who, with his wife Mary, was writing books for nearly 60 years when there were not so many books to read.
William and his brother Richard were born in a house called the Dene, now demolished. Close by the site of their home is the old chapel the family knew, built for the Quakers in 1839. The house, the chapel, and an array of seven stones in its graveyard with the names of Howitt and Tantum (the family name of William's mother) are the only memories in Heanor of its most distinguished son, who is buried with his wife near Rome.
Heanor has known too, Samuel Watson, who was buried in its church in 1715. A marvellous craftsman, he was responsible for the exquisite carving at Chatsworth where his work is of such striking beauty that when Horace Walpole called he imagined it to be by the great Grinling Gibbons.
Only the massive 15th century tower is left of the old church rebuilt in 1868. There is a small crucifix made from an old oak beam of the belfry, but all else is modern.
It was a Heanor boy, Henry Garnett, born in the middle of the 16th century, who grew up to be a central figure in the Gunpowder Plot. The son of a Protestant schoolmaster, he left Winchester for London and the Law, but turning Roman Catholic as a young man, went to Italy. He proved such a brilliant scholar there that it was with great reluctance that the Papal authorities permitted his return on a mission in which his friends pictured him as a lamb going to slaughter. He was to take part in the plots against the throne, stirring up rebellion first against Elizabeth I and then James. It was the Gunpowder Plot which brought to light documents by which he was incriminated. Garnett fled to Hindlip Hall, in Worcestershire, where he lay with a companion hidden for four days in a secret chamber, nourished by broth and other warm drinks conveyed by a reed through a hole in a chimney. He was driven out at last by foul air, and more than twenty times he appeared before his judges, but threats of torture and tricks of eavesdroppers failed to betray him into more than one admission. He acknowledged himself 'highly guilty, and to have offended God' in not revealing it. He pleaded that he was struck with horror at the proposal, and saw that, as he could not disclose the secret, he used every endeavour to prevail on the conspirators to abandon their undertaking. Sentence of death was passed on him, and he was drawn on a hurdle from the Tower of London to St Paul's Churchyard and executed.
Heanor has a fine park which provides an oasis away from the town. The town was once on the route of the world's longest tramway system running from Nottingham to Ripley. Nowadays, visitors may view the extensive displays of pictures, books and artefacts at the Heritage Centre.
|
