Derby - Markeaton Park
w/e 26 June 2005
All this week's pictures were taken
with a Kodak DX6490
In this changeable English climate we experienced a few days
of glorious summer weather and were able to enjoy a couple of
hours on one of them wandering through Derby's Markeaton Park.
The park which was originally part of the Markeaton Hall Estate
owned by the Mundy family from 1516, is Derby's most used leisure
facility. Markeaton Hall, a traditional half timbered building
was replaced by a new hall during the late 18th century but this
was demolished in the 1960s to be replaced by a landscaped terrace.
The Orangery however still remains.
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The Orangery today houses the park’s cafeteria and is now
a listed building. It was designed by Joseph Pickford in the
1770s. Sitting outside the Orangery sipping a cooling drink with
the accompanying trickle of water in the nearby fountain, one
could almost describe this as one of Nat 'King' Cole's "Lazy
Hazy Crazy Days of Summer".
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Behind the Orangery is the former stable block of Markeaton Hall
which now houses the Markeaton Craft Village. Set up in 1987
the village is made up of a number of individual units where
numerous skills and crafts may be observed. These include joinery,
ceramics, stained glass, pottery and beekeeping to name just
a few.
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  The
layout of the park has changed very little since its opening
by the Duke of Kent in June 1931 and beyond the Craft Village
is the duck pond. Although there are some ducks here, the main
occupants these days seem to be Canada geese. Water flows into
the pond via a small waterfall and under the bridge seen on the
right of the picture above and in these two small pictures.
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There are of course many floral features in the park. Trees and
shrubs abound and there are many herbaceous borders and seasonal
flower beds as well as a rose garden but the fauna also is an
important part. Here we see some of the waterfowl already mentioned
plus a grey squirrel obviously used to human proximity and a
blackbird that was finding the hot sunny conditions a little
uncomfortable.
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Markeaton is Derby's largest park and in these few images we
have only glimpsed a fraction of it. It was back in 1903 that
Mrs Mundy first donated five acres of the Markeaton Estate for
use as a recreation ground and the origins of the Mundy Play
Centre date back to 1924, when Mrs Mundy gave several more acres
of land to the people of Derby. By 1929 Mrs Mundy had died and
the estate had passed to the Reverend Clarke Maxwell who gave
the Hall and another twenty acres of its gardens to the Derby
Corporation. The remaining 180 acres of the park were bought
by the Corporation in 1930 and work began three years later to
increase the size of the lake which was opened in July 1934.
Today the park is the site of many events throughout the year.
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