History
St Edmund's
It does not take a great leap of imagination to see St Edmund's as the centre of a small English village - church, pub and a school across the road. The Red Cow has been a pub since 1753, originally the village stocks stood outside and the village mortuary was in a shed behind. This part of Allestree remains a Conservation Area, and this leaflet describes the area around the church.
The Allestree yew tree is the oldest thing in the churchyard, it was growing on this site before the Norman Conquest. When the church was shut during the 2020 pandemic, the Easter Candle was lit in its shadow. Perhaps this was a pre-Christian religious site, there may well have been an Anglo Saxon church here. Perhaps a missionary monk stood under the tree and preached the good news of Jesus.
In the Domesday Book of 1086, Allestree is an outlier of the main settlement at Mackworth. It is named as Adelardestrew, so perhaps this is Adelard's tree. The church is dedicated to St Edmund, a Saxon King of East Anglia - this might be another pointer to a Saxon foundation, although another school of thought says this dedication is a Victorian invention. Yew trees often grow in churchyards, probably for the practical reason that yew berries are poisonous to sheep, and yew provided the material for the English arrow - it is said that the scars in the base of the tower are the marks of where young Allestree men sharpened their arrows.
The leaflet below gives further detail and photos.
St Matthew's
Darley Abbey had no building for public worship after 1538 when the abbey was closed following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII. The Seal of the Abbey can be seen in the Millennium Window. After the Reformation Villagers had to travel to the mother parish of St Alkmund’s for Sunday worship, baptisms, weddings and funerals. Thomas Evans (1723-1814) - who is also in the Window - began to purchase land at Darley Abbey in the late eighteenth century. Thomas would take over the existing mill buildings that sat along the side of the Derwent, creating the cotton empire that the Evans family are best known for today. When he died in 1814, the remaining family took over the mills. It has been customary to associate all owners of "dark satanic mills" with cruelty and exploitation; yet the Evans family of Darley Abbey took their responsibilities as employers very seriously and dealt generously and kindly with their workers. They continued to build a community for their workers at Darley Abbey. Walter Evans I (1764-1839) took over his father’s responsibilities particularly in relation to the cotton mill and the village. It is to him that the village is indebted for its Church and its School, two aspects of life which were dear to his heart and, and in his mind, inseparable. At great personal expense he donated money for the building of both establishments: the Church completed in 1819 and the School in Brick Row in 1826.
St Matthew’s was consecrated on 24th June 1819 by Walter Evans on his 55th birthday. An Act of Parliament in 1818 made money available from Queen Anne's Bounty, for the construction of Churches in newly populous industrial districts. From this fund, Walter Evans I received £400 towards the building costs for a new church at Darley Abbey. It was designed and built by Nottingham architect, Henry Moses (1788-1867) in a Gothic style. Most of the craftsmen employed were local, such as the master mason, Stephen Swinnerton. Some of the stone used in the construction was quarried locally from a site at Allestree, with other stone for carved details and paving coming from further afield. Much of the stone was cut incorrectly, that is against the grain, and is the cause of some of the severe weathering and deterioration of the structure. You can see this by the main (South) door.
There is further detail in the two documents below.
