The White Horse Inn

The White Horse Inn
The White Horse Inn

This was a coaching inn built on the original pack horse route from the toll bar cottage at Stretton to Woolley Moor toll bar. You can see by the age of the trees on the road that this is an old road! The sign in front of the pub depicts a horse and cart carrying a ‘badger’ (i.e. measure) of salt down the toll road hence Badger Lane.

The front room was used as the court room for the local area with a visiting magistrate in attendance. If found guilty offenders were taken to the Greyhound at Milltown where a cell was kept in readiness!

If you walk through the car park and over the stile at the bottom you enter the Jubilee Recreation Ground at the back and you can sit and relax or play on the children’s apparatus!

Look across at the view, perhaps environmentalists will not appreciate the encroaching on the landscape of the Milltown quarry which seems to have taken over in its quest for limestone. However, the view is still enchanting. Across the top of the hills opposite is Coffin Road, marked by paving stones, which is the old route taken by coffin bearers from neighbouring hamlets of Lea and Dethick. These settlements were without their own burial grounds so corpses were brought to Ashover for their religious interment.

The White Horse Inn in snowMilltown buildings can be seen including the Methodist Chapel with the black roof.

In the next field you can see over the wall the entrance to the old drift mine. This did not prove a very successful source of coal as it kept flooding.

Miners from Woolley used to go to work in th mine at Morton. They travelled either on foot or bicycle or travelled with Mr Harold Fox in his specially converted Royal Mail van, painted blue and called ‘Blue Lady’. It had side seats and a half door at the back. LUXURY!

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