No go at Wingfield Manor

Sons and Lovers contains a detailed description of an Easter walk made by Paul Morel with friends and family from Alfreton to Ambergate. Separate accounts by Ada Lawrence and Jessie Chambers confirm that the walk really took place, in 1905. The highlight of the day was a visit to the ruins of Wingfield Manor, which provoked a lengthy and lyrical description: 'The young folk were in raptures.They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them ...'.

They were lucky not to visit the Manor today, since they would have no chance of exploration now. Despite being  what is ludicrously called in the 'care' of English Heritage, the site has been effectively closed to the public for the last few years, except for the occasional day when pre-booked parties can visit. English Heritage have produced no clear reason for denying access to one of the most remarkable historic sites in the North Midlands.

The photo shows the east side of the manor on a misty, frosty winter's morning.

Fanny's chapel?

The photo shows the current state of what was Moorgreen Congregational Chapel, an eighteenth-century structure which is now private housing. This appears to have been the location of the chapel featured in Lawrence's early short story 'Fanny and Annie'. Fanny has reluctantly returned to the district to marry Harry, her long-term sweetheart, but suffers the embarrassment of hearing him denounced as a philanderer from the floor of the chapel during a harvest festival service:

Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met ... and again the little old chapel was a bower, with its famous sheaves of corn, and corn-plaited pillars, its great bunches of grapes, dangling like tassels from the pulpit corners ... .

It seems likely that Lawrence based his story on a real incident, as he generally did, and it provides a particularly vivid insight into the morality of the non-conformist tradition that was so powerful in late-Victorian Eastwood. Half of the chapel is currently for sale, at £250,000.

The desolation of the Haggs

The photo shows all that can be seen of Haggs Farm from the public road, a glimpse of red brick buildings, though there is a better view from High Park Wood opposite.

But the farm was the emotional centre of Lawrence's world for a number of years: 'Only to be there was an exhilaration and a joy to him'. At that time the Chambers family were the tenant farmers, and Lawrence became close friends with several of them, especially Jessica, the 'Miriam' of Sons and Lovers. But the farm and its surroundings also features in a number of short stories, including his first, 'A Prelude', while it can be argued that the description of Mellor's hut in his last work, Lady Chatterley's Lover, has its origins in a similar place in the adjoining Willey Spring Woods.

According to Ann Howard, Jessie's niece, writing in 1985, the farm belonged to the Barber family, who loathed Lawrence on account of his portrait of them as the Criches in Women in Love. Consequently they have denied all access to the farm to Lawrence lovers, and resisted appeals for its preservation. It's remarkable that a quarrel nearly a century old can still be festering today.