Calendar

Speaker: Janine Buckley

This talk celebrates the tremendous efforts of past pit ponies and colliery horses. With first-hand accounts from former miners and freshly discovered documentary and photographic evidence, this talk delves deeply into the lives of a concealed equestrian workforce that fuelled almost every aspect of life on the surface. Learn how their working conditions changed over time, and how they are remembered by their former handlers. Join us for this fitting tribute to these hidden heroes. If you have any memorabilia or photographs relating to pit ponies, please feel free to bring them on the night.

Janine Buckley MA is Historic Environment Officer (Buildings) in Nottinghamshire County Council’s planning department.

Organised by the Industrial Archaeology Section

Library open upstairs on the 1st floor.

Speaker: Karen Kreft

Karen has created a database of over 3000 Calke servants. Her talk gives an insight into the lives of those who toiled ‘below stairs’.

Organised by the Local History Section

Speaker: Nick Hill

The ‘Old Priory’ at Repton School in Derbyshire lies next to the village’s celebrated parish church, with its Anglo-Saxon crypt. The last study of the building was published in 1929, but a programme of detailed building analysis, accompanied by tree-ring dating. has recently been carried out by Nick Hill. A much more complete understanding of the building has emerged, with an article planned for Derbyshire Archaeological Journal. An Augustinian priory was established at Repton in the late twelfth century, with the ‘Old Priory’ forming the west range of the cloister. Following the Suppression, much of the priory, including its church, was destroyed in the mid-sixteenth century, but the west range was converted to form the core of Repton School. Remaining fabric allows the original form of the west range to be pieced together, with the prior’s lodging and guest hall on the first floor, over an impressive undercroft. Now dated to 1168-80, the building can now be recognised as an important and rare survival of a monastic west range.

Nick Hill lives in Leicestershire and has been recording and researching historic buildings in the Midlands for many years. He is treasurer of the Vernacular Architecture Group and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. A particular area of research and publication in recent years has been halls and chamber blocks of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now retired, he worked with English Heritage and Historic England for over thirty years, coordinating major projects of conservation and repair to historic buildings.

Organised by the Architecture Section

Library open upstairs on the 1st floor.