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South Wingfield
South Wingfield is best known for it's Manor House with it’s gaunt towers and empty turrets stands proudly isolated on it’s own hilltop overlooking Wingfield Park to the south, and across a narrow valley separating it from the village, which lies along a ridge of land a quarter of a mile away to the north. According to some commentaries, the Manor has been a ruin and has remained unoccupied for two hundred and thirty years. The centre of the village is found along a ridge of higher ground, at a crossroads that was once the old market place. This is the hub of the present village, with post office, shop, and two ancient hostelries, one of which, the once thatched Horse & Jockey was an old staging post on the Nottingham to Newhaven turnpike in the bygone days of horse-drawn transport. Past the Old Yew Tree Inn and down the hill past the entrance to Wingfield Manor and south-westward over the hills to Crich, which is just two miles away. South Wingfield also has a rather unusual feature of the lack of a parish church. The local church is in fact half a mile away across the valley on the west bank of the River Amber in village of Oakerthorpe.
From the earliest times this had been an agricultural community, but William the Conqueror sequestered large tracts of land which became Royal Forests and South Wingfield was surrounded by three of them; Sherwood Forest to the east, Duffield Frith to the south, and the Royal Forest of the Peak to the north and west. Since the eighteenth century the village has seems to spread east, due to the introduction of coal and iron workings which sprang up on the west bank of the Amber on the Oakerthorpe side of the valley. At the bottom of the hill, Taylors Corn Stores and the Old Mill stand beside the Amber at the junction of Holme Lane and Church Lane. There were two or three very early mills in Wingfield Park, but these were dismantled long ago and only a weir remains as testimony to their former existence. Taylor’s tall water-powered mill, which replaced earlier mills on the same site, was built in the early nineteenth century and plays an integral role in the social and industrial heritage of the village. The railway in the nineteenth century also added to the growth of the village.
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