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In this delightful green hamlet, with its handful of cottages, is a great house which has long been the home of the Gells.
Here was born Sir John Gell, the Parliamentary General of the Civil War, an extraordinary man who, with a rough and rather brutal spirit, led the forces of the fairest army raised in England. His doublet, colours, and other relics are still preserved at Hopton Hall, an Elizabethan house much altered in the 18th century.
Very different was Sir William Gell, a famous classical scholar and traveller, born here in 1777. Gentle and kind-hearted, he spent most of his life in Italy, where he wrote books on Rome and Pompeii. His greatest joy was to entertain distinguished people in his lovely home at Naples, where he was often found with his books, drawings, and maps, his guitar, together with two to three dogs. There he died in 1836,and was buried on a hill above the famous bay.
Sir Philip Gell, another baronet, founded the almshouses in the village in 1719.
The name of the Gells will long be remembered in Derbyshire, for the Via Gellia, a lovely road through a romantic woodland valley, was name after one of them who made it.
One of Hopton's joys is a lovely lane which climbs through a glorious hillside plantation, the way we take to find the Via Gellia two miles away to the north. There were Gells who stayed in and about their ancestral Hopton to strike shrewd blows for the Commonwealth against the Stuarts, but in happier days the family produced in Sir William Gell an even more conspicuous figure in the life of peace. A Royal Academy student, he went to Greece, exploring and sketching what he believed to be the site and environs of the old Troy,and tracing, as he believed, the footsteps of Ulysses in his little island kingdom. He settled down in Italy, with homes in Naples and Rome, where he was a centre of an artistic and learned society. Byron, Moore, and Scott were among his friends. Surrounded by noble books, writing, drawing and publishing, he was a prince of hosts and one of the best known men in Europe.
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