It was a fine, autumn morning, or at least it was when the drizzle had stopped and the sun finally emerged, and I'd decided to pedal south to the land of hedges and a bygone boozer that I frequently drove past on the way to work and back a couple of decades ago. I opted for some lanes which I rarely ride and whilst the road surface, where it actually existed, was often covered with mud and gravel the lanes themselves were pleasant enough and beginning to show their autumn colours.
After a number of left turns and a couple of rights I started to question the satnav feature on my bike's computer. I needn't have worried, I was still on the right route, and I eventually popped out in Weston Underwood where its impossible to miss this sign.
Inn Farm is a former coaching inn on the old Derby to Manchester road, which is impossible to get a good photograph of. Even those special cameras which turn bijou cottages into spacious manor houses for estate agents would struggle.
Previously known as the Scarsdale Arms, after the baronial name of the Curzon family of nearby Kedleston Hall, it sits at the foot of the hill which climbs Bullhurst Lane. At the top of the hill is Mugginton's Cock Inn.
With the Cock's name coming from the additional 'cock' horse added to the normal train to assist with hauling a stagecoach up inclines, I can't help but wonder if they were attached at the Scarsdale before being removed at the Cock.
The earliest reference to the name Scarsdale Arms that I've come across is a report in the Derby Telegraph in 1847 of the marriage of a Thomas Hunt of the Scarsdale Arms in Weston Underwood to a Sarah Aldred. Here they are recorded in the 1851 census, but the place is called the Weston Inn.
Thomas's family had had the inn for a while as Glover's directory of 1829 lists his mother, Judith, as a victualler in Weston Underwood, without naming the establishment.
What happened to Thomas and Sarah I don't know. I can't find any further trace of them. In 1855 Sarah's father John is shown as being at the inn in the Post Office Directory...
...but of Thomas and Sarah I can find no further trace.
John Aldre(a)d wasn't there for long, as in 1859 the inn, calling itself the Weston Inn, is being run by Scotsman Samuel Newbold...
...and his wife Eliza, who'd moved from Derby's Star and Garter which we met in this earlier post. Samuel and Eliza were still there a couple of years later...
...and Eliza continued at the Scarsdale after Samuel was placed in Mugginton's All Saints' churchyard in December 1863. Indeed, Mrs Newbold was still keeping the inn, as well doing a bit of farming when the next census was taken in 1871...
...and that's the last reference to the place as an inn that I can find. The current farm has a website on which it mentions that the inn closed in the 1930s, but I can find no reference to it in any later census or in any directory that I possess or have access to. So what has happened to it after the Newbold era? Well, in a new bold venture (Did you see what I did there?) the current occupants recently opened a self-service shop...
...in which they've installed a vending machine. So whilst you can no longer get a pint of beer at the Scarsdale you can quench your thirst with some milk. You'll have to buy it in litres, mind you, not pints.
Having reached my target it was time to head home and pedal up Bullhurst Lane. If only I had some additional assistance like a cock horse. I eventually arrived in Hulland Ward where it was good to see that the Nag's Head, which was boarded up last time that I pedalled past, was open once more.
More pedalling. I skirted Carsington Water and whilst halfway up Brassington hill, still on the old Derby to Manchester stagecoach route, I wondered where the cock horses were obtained from for this much longer and steeper ascent. With the October sun not totally devoid of heat I worked up a decent thirst whilst my computer kept bleeping at me and telling me that I was off route. I ignored it as I knew my way home. Later I discovered that, for some reason or other, it was trying to direct me through Wirksworth. It seems that I wasn't wrong to mistrust it earlier, but at least it had got me through the lanes less travelled to Weston Underwood and the Scarsdale.
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