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Sheltering under the crest of a wooded ridge, Holloway seems to be at the top of the world as we climb up to it from Whatstandwell.
It looks out magnificently over valley and hill, rocks and trees, which seem to have no end. It has a pleasing church built in 1903, with a tower standing above the chancel, nave walls lined with oak, a fine oak pulpit, and an alabaster font.
One summer’s day in 1856 a lady left a convent on the banks of the River Thames, took a train to the nearest station to Holloway, and walked from there to her home. She was unattended and hardly expected when she opened the door of Lea Hurst to reveal herself to her astonished household. She was Florence Nightingale - home again. Florence was the most talked-of woman in Europe. She had astonished the government by her courage and frightened every old woman in the army by her daring, for she had torn the red tape of the army to shreds. She had made memorable the insanity of the Crimean War with the opening of another chapter of humanity; she had soothed the last hours of soldiers wounded by war and murdered by neglect. In all our history there was no woman quite like her, and when it was all over and she came home, all England waited to acclaim her. The navy offered her a warship and would have brought her home in state, but she would not have it and came home privately.
When it was known that she would go to her Derbyshire home there was talk of triumphal arches, addresses from Mayors and Corporations, all the panoply and pageantry of regimental bands. But Florence Nightingale would not have any of it. She arrived unknown in London and early the next morning knocked at the door of the home of the Bermondsey nuns and spent a few hours with them. Then she went to the station and caught a train at an unusual hour. She arrived unseen in this stone
house with many gables in the charming garden above the Derwent which her father had built in 1825.
Florence, who was born in Florence, came here when she was five. Here she loved to be, to visit the old folk in their cottages, to help with village entertainments; she could well be content, she said, to do this all her life.
Her balcony was a great joy to her, commanding a view of the garden with its stone terraces massed with flowers, and of a meadow beyond; losing itself among the trees running down to the river.
Often the sound of the Derwent was in her ears, and she had recalled it one night in hospital in Scutari. There was a great storm, and suddenly Florence Nightingale said; ”How I like to hear that ceaseless roar; it puts me in mind of the Derwent. How often have I listened to it from the nursery window!”
If ever she lived to see England again, she wrote from the Crimea, the western breezes of her hilltop home would be her first longing. It was to Lea Hurst that she came home again, to this house that we may see, now fittingly being used as an old people’s home.
The countryside around Holloway (and Lea for that matter) is tranquil and quite unspoilt, and there are endless footpaths for the leisure walker to enjoy
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