Regarding your query about the Matlock book, research is effectively finished. During the pandemic, my brain kept hanging upside down, which apparently enabled it to solve even the most intractable problems, such as the location of Ashbury Crofts Mine (the site of the first pumping engine in the Derbyshire ore field). Jim was so desperate to know that he put a query in the pdmhs newsletter c.2001 but I warned him that only a real expert historian could find the answer. It took me 19 years. Just need to get it published now but everything is difficult with the current paralysis. I would not want any royalties from the book.
Thanks everyone for your efforts. The scan and aerial view show the area of Potosi vein but not what I presume to be the course of the sough in Ible Wood off to the right, as marked on Jim's map.As regards pdmhs and my book, I was told it was too large for a special bulletin (and it is much longer now because so much new information has come in) although I have worked hard to precis it - there is no waffle in it. Also pdmhs are struggling a bit with the death of Steve Thompson who was a computer expert. There is a lot of work to prepare something like this for publication. I could always pay for publication myself but it is not ideal - self editing is never recommended and distribution is very difficult. It'll all work out one day. It was so fortunate that it was not published a couple of years ago because it would have been rendered obsolete by the new information almost at once.Returning to Potosi, it is not mentioned in Book 52 which covers the 1740s unless it then went by a different name. It is recorded in the ore accounts for 1793-4 - see DRO Bag Coll 587(43). The barmaster's ore accounts for Middleton-by_Wirksworth Liberty do not start until 1848 and they indicate very little ore at Potosi.
(though I don't have the spare time that Steve did)
Put me down for a copy, looking forward to it already
Quote from: Brains on February 20, 2021, 09:08:24 pmPut me down for a copy, looking forward to it already Me too of course
Could do with some better photos of surface features and I had hoped to get round Matlock before leaves opened, while vistas were still clear, but the continuing lockdown has stymied that. Am not much of a photographer at all - Andy Hayes used to oblige in that direction.
Please put me down for a copy.
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