Our family was on the railways before they even had trains.

That’s what my brusque aunties said, when we visited Derbyshire. It was all too much for a fiercely pedantic child.

There were things that I heard and was willing to accept, like ‘duck’ as a term of endearment. But railways before trains? Like ships before seas, impossible. I never asked. It was said in the same tone as when they asked my mother if I still wasn’t eating mashed potato.

Ancestors were conjured as a rebuke. Ancestors didn’t cry when they fell over, they got up early in the morning and they scrumped apples, not biscuits, when they were hungry. And, being dead, they never did anything as daft as move south.

They rested in the few square miles of earth where the family had lived for hundreds of years. But my dad had gone south at the prompt of a certain Dr Beeching, and his children were doomed to a flat and prosperous land, coming to Derbyshire only for school holidays.

They said the same line almost every visit. As I got older, it seemed little more than comic exaggeration, like when they said I wouldn’t last five minutes at my cousins’ school. My ancestors were so keen that they turned up early for work. Not hours early, but years. Railwaymen in search of a train. Decades later, I’ve just realised that my aunties were dealing in historical fact.

Middleton Top
But first I should tell you more about this place. The Peak District has an inherent contradiction. It has a strong claim to be the birthplace of the industrial revolution, but for as long as it has had mills and factories, it has been visited and celebrated for its ‘unspoilt’ beauty.

I think the two co-exist extraordinarily well. The Victorian writer John Ruskin railed against a railway being built through Monsal Dale, but the breathtakingly elegant Headstone Viaduct that was built in that valley now graces many a postcard. Fifty years after it was last crossed by a train (Dr Beeching again) its future is as unshakeable as the cliffs. More so, if anything, since the ‘cliffs’ in Derbyshire often turn out to be the edge of a quarry.

Middleton Top Engine House, as close as my working-class family ever got to having a ‘seat’, is another industrial structure that has been there so long it almost feels like the strikingly beautiful countryside is intruding on it, rather than the contrary.

Brick-built with huge arched windows, like a misshapen Methodist chapel with a chimney, it sits at one end of a 33-mile stretch of track that was once the Cromford and High Peak Railway.

It was spoken of more often than visited, although only a couple of miles from where my relatives lived. It was clearly a place we had loved and lost, where good work had been done. It was the only time I heard my relatives used the word ‘beautiful’ although they were talking about the engineering inside it rather than the views without.

I was expected to know what the engine was for, but didn’t, and the building was locked so I never saw it. From the silence it was clearly no longer in use. The house where the family had lived sat just behind it, used, I think for storage for offices after the railway closed in 1967.

As the years went on, we seemed to visit Derbyshire only for funerals, including those of the aunties whom I grew to admire. There were too many recent lives to remember to have much time for those who passed a century before, and never time to visit Middleton Top.

Visiting today

My motives for returning this summer with my family were more practical than nostalgic. We were on holiday, I knew there was a bike hire shop nearby, and a few hours’ cycling with the children seemed less wearing than a theme park.

As I handed over my credit card, the man in the shop said: “Now there’s a name.” He seemed too old to be a Harry Potter fan (the Deathly Hallows has caused us a lot of grief), and then he asked if I had seen the plaque.

I looked blank, so he directed me to a black granite plaque near our family’s former home. Under an elegant etching of a steam train, were the names of the three family members who lived and worked at the engine house.

There was Samuel, my great-great-grandfather, his son Herbert, and my great-uncle Alec, who used to shout “get out, you buggers” to my dad and his brothers when they played in his garden, but he hadn’t really meant it. Between them, they had given 105 years of service.

I suddenly felt a connection with my ancestors, and this place, that I had never felt previously. But why? There was nothing on that plaque that I didn’t either vaguely know or could have discovered with a little research.

No, it was about recognition. If mighty figures like Ozymandias get forgotten, then so with certainty do those millions of quiet working-class lives that went before us. Even when they seem remarkable to us – the hours, the poverty, the commitment to one employer – there are so many of them, with such little documentation, that they get barely a nod. And yet my family had a plaque.

Your ancestors probably deserve one too – I really am not making a special case for the Hallows family here. I was puzzled how it got there – but have since found out it was organised by my second cousin Glenis. I am so grateful for, and moved by its presence.

You have probably visited a place which has a special association, perhaps a house owned by an ancestor. It can be a bittersweet experience, peering through the replacement windows while trying not to creep out the current residents, quietly cursing the £3,000 sale in the 1950s when Notting Hill was a slum.

But what becomes rapidly evident is that places forget us much more quickly than we forget places. Houses recycle residents, or disappear altogether, and few family memories survive their owners.

The plaque felt like an undeserved blessing. I had done nothing to keep alive the memory of my family, and what I had heard as a child I had ignored or misunderstood. But private history had somehow become public, and forgotten lives were being celebrated.

But the children had come for a bike ride, not a Proustian madeleine moment, and so we followed the line on our bikes, through a tunnel so dark that we screamed and clipped each other’s wheels, and then up the Hopton incline, only one in 14 but tough for young legs and I’d imagine even tougher for a fully-loaded steam train.

We were just another family on holiday, but I couldn’t help but think of what my ancestors would have made of it. They would have had a few questions. Like where were the trains? And why didn’t I live there? And if I had moved, why the hell had I come back to pay good money to traipse back and forth along the line?

But it was when I got home that the force of the place really struck me. I found out that the three men and their families who had lived next to the engine house were part of a much larger contingent.

There before the railways
There had been members of the family on the Cromford and High Peak Railway for its entire 137-year history. And they had given everything – even their lives – in its service.

The line, I found, used to have eight engine houses which pulled the trucks up the steeper inclines. Over time, as trains became more powerful, they could cope with the slopes, and the engine houses were pulled down, leaving only Middleton Top which crowned one of the steepest.

It was then that the family motto made sense for the first time. The first part of the line opened in 1830 and, according to a diligent researcher, there were members of the family there from the very beginning. But the first train did not arrive at the railway until 1841 – before that they had used horses. The family were there before there were trains. Eleven years earlier in fact.

We were almost there before there were any effective trains. Stephenson’s Rocket had won the Rainhill Trials in 1829 to decide which train should run on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. But the first members of the family who worked on the railway may have known little about the risky and experimental work being carried out hundreds of miles away. They joined a railway without trains, and probably without even having knowledge of them.

When I read more about the lives my ancestors had, it also gave a deeper meaning to our squealing antics on the bikes.

In October 1854, Ralph Hallows, my great-great-great-uncle, had the job of attaching a carriage to a chain fed from an engine house, so they could be carefully sent down an incline. For some reason, on that day, he didn’t use the chain but instead relied on the carriage’s brakes.

The carriage went out of control “descending with fearful velocity, running into stone [trucks] at the foot of the plane, where it of course was smashed to pieces”.

That quote is from the inquest, which even by the stony standards of Victorian officialdom, is punctilious in its blame and absent in its sympathy. Ralph “paid for his rash act with his life… he had entirely disobeyed a most stringent order”. The railway company, it stressed, was exonerated of all blame.

We had cycled down that slope, and at about the halfway point had that glorious feeling of being slightly out of control, but in no greater risk than a grazed knee. It was also halfway down, according to the inquest, that Ralph had lost control of his carriage, probably knowing already that he faced his death at the bottom.

Twenty years later, his younger brother James died, having been knocked down by a wagon. In 1880, another of his brothers Joseph was working in the Hopton tunnel when he and two workmates were buried in a rockfall. He left a widow and 10 children.

James and Joseph Hallows were blameless in their deaths, and yet there seem to be no reports suggesting that the railway company was at fault. When a mistake could be pinned on an employee, he was publicly castigated for his “rash act’“ When deaths happened in a working culture with a disregard for safety, it was an ‘accident’, nothing more, nothing less.

It was that same tunnel through which we had screamed and giggled. Was this respectful? Now that we know, would we allow ourselves to enjoy it again?

Of course we would. And to think otherwise is what happens when you’re given a plaque. You get above yourself and start creating a shrine. Hallowed ground, if you’d pardon the pun.

We invest great meaning in the places where our ancestors lived, but how we behave there is up to us. It’s different at a battlefield, because of scale and the need to respect the feelings of others. But this was a place where life would have carried on the very next day.

I don’t think my ancestors would have been offended. They had to pick themselves up and learn how to laugh again, and they wouldn’t have begrudged it in others. Only Queen Victoria had the luxury of mourning for decades.

What they could never have understood is why people pay good money to sweat their way up the same slopes where they worked. But although we carry ice creams rather than shovels, they might have been happy to think there were Hallowses on the line before the trains, and Hallowses many years after.

With thanks to Glenis Smith, wirksworth.org.uk and Andy Pollock. For more details on the history of the engine house and dates of open days, see middleton-leawood.org.uk