TRAVEL TALES of ranaruby

BAKEWELL Bakewell - old charm and pudding Moorlands in the English countryside always bring back to my memory Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’. There, she vividly described the nineteenth-century Yorkshire moorland as open, wild, exposed, with untamed wind force and brooding character. The neighbouring Derbyshire moor, which we saw from Monsal Head, a Peak District viewpoint, was in contrast somewhat softer and picturesque. Maybe because we saw it as tourists in the twenty-first century. On our way back, we took a brief halt at a small, charming town. It was a pleasant surprise, as I had no previous knowledge about the town and its breathtaking beauty. Nor had I come across the name of this town, which is so heavily wrapped with history right from the Anglo-Saxon era. Early settlement around the 9th – 10th centuries is associated with a cluster of warm springs by the River Wye. Archaeologists have even discovered t...

DERBY DERBY -  the entrance to the stunning Peak District As far as I could recollect, I first heard of the word ‘derby’ in connection with horse racing contests. That was quite a way back, perhaps during my college days in Calcutta, when at local tea stall ‘addas’, a small group of people interested in horse racing used to discuss about derbies at the Calcutta Race course. In the new millennium, people have started debating the derby between two major football rivals, East Bengal and Mohan Bagan. I have never taken any interest in horse derby, but in the case of football, which I love, the phrase ‘derby’ stumped me when I first heard it during one of the post-COVID clashes between East Bengal and Mohan Bagan at the Salt Lake Stadium in Calcutta. Why Derby? The answer to this seemed to have been waiting for me when, along with my wife, I visited the town of Derby in England. Even the name of the city, Derby, stemmed from ‘Djura-by’, meaning the village of...

THE GEORGE (Inn of Hathersage) The George  (Inn of Hathersage) Hathersage is about ten 9miles from Sheffield in England. Situated strategically in the Peak District National Park, this small, picturesque village offers much more than initially expected—something we only realised when our son Arjun took us to The George for lunch. This majestic 500-year-old hotel sits right on the T-junction of the road descending from the medieval town of Bakewell. It also boasts a literary history. When Charlotte Brontë, the eldest and most prolific of the three surviving Brontë sisters of the nineteenth century, visited Hathersage in 1845, she stayed at The George. The hotel is believed to have inspired Charlotte Brontë’s renowned novel, ‘Jane Eyre’. The fictional ‘George Inn’ appears in her story. Descriptions of the inn’s interiors, such as ‘mantelpiece ornaments, furnishings, prints of George III and the Prince of Wales’, are based on her observations during her stay. The b...