Aldercar and Langley Mill Parish Bounds

Before parish boundaries were written down and mapped, they were remembered by walking them. At Rogationtide, in the days before Ascension, the parish would process around its edge so that everyone, children especially, knew exactly where it ran. The custom is called beating the bounds.

An honest word about this particular line, because it is not as old as the custom. Aldercar and Langley Mill has only been a parish since 1984, when the former Heanor Urban District was divided into three: this parish, Codnor, and Heanor and Loscoe. Before that the area had been unparished since 1974, and before that it lay in the ancient parish of Heanor, some 7,000 acres taking in the townships of Heanor, Langley and Codnor. Nobody ever beat these exact bounds, because they did not exist while the custom was alive.

Two fifths of it is much older than that, though. About 6.9 km of the 16.5 km boundary, the whole eastern side in two long stretches, is the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire county line running down the River Erewash, and the two shires have been divided there since the tenth or eleventh century. So this is a walk of two halves: a thousand-year-old county boundary on one side, and lines drawn by a boundary commission in 1984 on the other.

The walk follows the boundary as closely as public rights of way permit, which is closely but not exactly. For most of its length it stays within about 60 metres of the true line. Three stretches make that impossible: the boundary runs through private farmland in places, straight down the middle of the Cromford Canal in others, and along the eastern side it sits within a few metres of the A610 for the best part of a mile, where there is no footpath at all. There the route keeps to Cromford Road instead, and you walk parallel to the line rather than on it.

Roughly seven tenths of the walk falls inside the parish and three tenths just outside, which is simply what it looks like to walk a line rather than a circle around it.

Two things are going on in this walk, and they began separately. One is a Christian procession asking for a good harvest. The other is far older and much more worldly: people checking where their land stopped.

Older than the church part

The Romans marked private land with boundary stones dedicated to Terminus, the god of landmarks, a scheme traditionally credited to Numa Pompilius, Rome's second king, in the seventh century BC. The stones were visited every year on 23 February at the festival of Terminalia, when cakes and wine were carried out to them and there was sport and dancing at the edges of the land.

Separately the Romans kept the Robigalia on 25 April, a procession to appease Robigus, the spirit of wheat rust, and keep disease out of the standing corn.

Those two feed the two halves of what survives. The boundary walking descends from the Terminalia, the prayers for the crops from the Robigalia, and the Christian calendar eventually absorbed both.

The custom was already here before the church took it over. Walking the bounds is mentioned in the laws of Alfred the Great and Athelstan, and the Norsemen brought comparable practices of their own. That last point carries some local weight: this parish sat in the Danelaw, and Derby was one of its Five Boroughs.

How it became Rogation

The word is from the Latin rogare, to ask. In the fifth century a form of prayers and responses called the Lesser Litany was established at Vienne, introduced there around AD 470 by bishop Mamertus after a run of disasters in his diocese. The Council of Orleans ordered it kept in 511 and Rome took it up by 816. Chanted in procession out around the crops, it served as both penitence and a petition for the fruits of the earth, and it settled onto the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension Day. The Greater Litany of 25 April was the Christian substitute for the Robigalia, taking over its date outright.

The distinction survives in the Church of England: the Lesser Litany is in the Book of Common Prayer and still used at some services, while the Greater Litany is not.

The medieval processions were not quiet affairs. Sarum texts describe banners carried through the parish, a dragon standing for Pontius Pilate leading the way and a lion for Christ behind it, and torches weighing anything up to forty pounds. In the north of England the week was called gang week or gang go week, from ganging round the parish to mark its bounds. Milkwort picked up the names Rogation flower and Gang flower, from being used to dress the pole the children carried.

Why the boys got bumped

Walking the boundary was the practical half of it. With few maps and little literacy, a parish knew its own edge because people had walked it and could swear to it. The procession stopped at each marker and struck it with green boughs of birch or willow, which is where the beating comes in, and the priest read Psalms 103 and 104. Royal charters under Elizabeth I and Charles II kept the custom going and required the minister to deliver the sentence: Cursed be he which translateth the bounds and doles of his neighbours.

Boys were brought along on purpose, and at the markers they were bumped against the stones, upended, whipped or thrown in the pond. It sounds like cruelty and was really a filing system. A boy of ten who had been dunked at a particular stone could still point at it sixty years later, and that memory was the parish's title deed. Churchwardens' accounts show small sums paid out afterwards in compensation, sometimes recorded as fines.

It was not always voluntary. In one village three men were fined five pounds each for forcibly bumping the curate. They had asked him to be bumped; on his declining, two took him by the arms and one by the legs, lifted him off the ground and bumped him heartily on the stone.

Buns and ale

Churchwardens also recorded what the followers ate and drank, along with complaints at vestry meetings about how much it cost. Buns, cheese and ale, with gingerbread and oranges handed out to the crowd, and perambulation money, lawful money of the realm, distributed along the way. At the beating of St Peter's bounds in Derby in 1844, the party got through 200 buns and 76 gallons of ale.

Where it survives it is still done properly. When Richmond in Yorkshire walked its old borough boundary in August 1983, 500 people followed the Mayor and Town Council, with a Bellman and Crier to read the proclamations, a Banner bearer, an Axeman whose ancient duty was to clear obstacles from the line, and a Wader who carried the Mayor on his back into the middle of the river where the boundary ran.

Crich did this, up the road, in 1984

The Crich branch of the Workers' Educational Association revived their own perambulation in June 1984 and wrote it up. Their parish boundary runs about fourteen miles, so they split it into three sections walked on a Saturday afternoon, a Wednesday evening and a Sunday morning. Nineteen of them set off from Wakebridge behind a proclamation scroll finished with lampshade tassels, a banner in red, white and blue ribbon and a mock-up axe. At Shuckstone Cross they said a prayer and threw coins into the air for a scramble in the grass, reviving the distribution of lawful money. At the Canada Farm boundary stone the author, Joan Wragg, was lifted bodily on and off the marker in the manner of the curate, and reported no bruises.

They hit the same problem this walk does. Their boundary runs down the middle of the Derwent and the Amber, so they walked the canal towpath alongside instead and stood on the bridges to claim they had at least been above the line. Parts of it crossed private ground and needed the owners' permission. Four decades on, the difficulties of walking a parish boundary have not changed much.

When Rogationtide falls

Rogation Sunday is the fifth Sunday after Easter, so the whole thing moves with Easter and can land anywhere from late April to early June. Traditionally the bounds were walked once every seven years rather than annually.

The Major Rogation is fixed at 25 April whatever Easter does.

Historical detail from the Wikipedia articles on Rogation days and beating the bounds, and from Beating the Bounds, Crich by Joan E. Wragg, published by the Crich branch of the Workers' Educational Association in 1984 and available from Crich Parish, which is the source for the Derby and Crich detail. Dates calculated from the date of Easter.

The boundary was chosen by history rather than by scenery, but it takes in a fair amount on the way round.

Codnor Castle

On the north-western leg the route runs along Castle Lane, which is named after what sits just off it. Codnor Castle is a thirteenth century ruin, held from around 1211 by the de Greys, who became Lords Grey of Codnor, and afterwards by the Zouche family until 1634, when they sold up and emigrated to Virginia. Its last resident was Streynsham Master, a High Sheriff of Derbyshire, who was there until 1724. Fragments of the keep, curtain wall and round towers survive, with arrow loops still visible.

It is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a Grade II listed building, and it is on the at-risk register. The castle site itself is private and not open to the public. The walk passes on rights of way nearby, so look, but do not go in.

The Great Northern Basin

At the southern end the route comes within a few metres of the Great Northern Basin, the junction where the Cromford, Erewash and Nottingham canals meet. The plaque there records that it was built by William Jessop in 1796, restored between 1971 and 1973 by the Erewash Canal Preservation and Development Association, and reopened on 26 May 1973.

A second plaque, fixed to the wall under the bridge a little before it, reads: Cromford Canal 1794, engineered by William Jessop and Benjamin Outram. Two centuries of canal engineering by the same hand, both within a few paces of the path.

No boundary stones, yet

The obvious thing to look for on a boundary walk is the markers themselves. There are none recorded on this parish boundary. A search of OpenStreetMap for boundary stones and markers returns nothing on the route, nothing on the line and nothing inside the parish. The nearest recorded stone is about 1.9 km to the south and carries no inscription; the nearest inscribed one is 9.6 km away and reads LP, for Lenton Parish.

That does not mean there are none. It means nobody has recorded any here. Twenty-five boundary stones are mapped across Derbyshire, so the tag is in use, just not in this parish. If you find one out on the bounds, a photograph and a location would put it on the map for good. That, after all, was the entire point of bumping the boys.

The place to look is the eastern side. That stretch is the county boundary and has been for a thousand years, so it is the part of this route old enough to have been marked. The western lines only date from 1984 and were never walked in procession by anybody. The old Ordnance Survey County Series sheets, which are free to view on the National Library of Scotland map viewer, mark boundary stones as B.S. and are the best place to start hunting.

Apart from that single crossing, the walk spends no distance on the A610 at all.