It seems highly likely that the current Cat and Fiddle Windmill sits on the site of an older mill owned by St Mary’s Abbey. It is one of only two post mills in Derbyshire (the other being a skeleton at South Normanton near Alfreton) and has the date 1788 carved on its upper crosstree. It was originally an open-trestle mill; its roundhouse was added in 1844, made of brick and local sandstone and whitewashed externally. A track was fitted to the top of the roundhouse wall and rollers to its body, which ran round to help steady the mill and take some of the strain off the post. Two pairs of underdrift stones were placed on a hurst or framing in the breast; the drive for winding the mill was generally geared down, and this gearing can still be seen. The windshaft bearings are made of stone, and a solitary steelyard with a wooden beam can be found in connection with the beam scales. The floor was constructed below ground level to allow free access below the crosstrees. The lower crosstree and the main post were renewed in 1895, the latter coming from a mill at Colwick. The mill was run by the Smedley family from 1870 until it was sold in the early 1980s by Stanton Ironworks, which had acquired it in 1912. It had worked until the end of the Second World War, when the drive to one pair of stones broke; it finally ceased to work in 1952 when George Smedley died, although his widow Marjorie continued to turn the mill whenever the wind changed. In its last years the flour ground was made into bread and sold in West Hallam by my informant Christine Cross’s grandfather; it was serviced every year, and also ground corn as animal feed. It had at one point a steam engine.
By the end of the century, far-reaching changes were afoot in Dale. The village sits in 45 square miles of coal measures, and heavy industry was on its way. The foundations of a furnace were laid at Pond Close in 1789, and the associated pond is still there, in the area of Dale still known as Furnace Ponds. In the next century, Dale was to become a hive of industry, so the following observation presumably refers to a time preceding these developments: ‘”Go to Depedale” would be our advice to anyone who wishes to see a picture of primitive life – to enjoy rural scenery, and to have a day of converse with the past.’
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One of Dale’s most illustrious families, the Hollingworths, produced in the late 18th and 19th centuries a scion who went on to become a highly effective and much loved Methodist minister. This is Revd Joseph Hollingworth, born in November 1781 in Dale. Revd Joseph’s grandfather was one of the first members of the Methodist Society in Dale and kept open house for itinerant preachers; his father was born on 27th July 1748 and joined the Wesleyan Society in 1786; his mother belonged to the Moravian church in nearby Ockbrook, founded there in 1740.