Draycott and Church Wilne is a civil parish within the Borough of Erewash, which is in the county of Derbyshire, England. Partially built up and otherwise rural, its population was 3,090 residents in the 2011 census. The parish is north west of London, south east of the county city of Derby, and west of the nearest market town of Long Eaton. It shares a boundary with the parishes of Breaston, Elvaston, Hopwell, Ockbrook and Borrowash, Risley and Shardlow and Great Wilne.
Geography
Location
Placement and size Draycott and Church Wilne parish is surrounded by the following local Derbyshire places:
Risley to the north Great Wilne to the south Breaston to the east Ambaston and Borrowash to the west.
It is in area, in length and in width, within the south western portion of the Erewash district, and is to the south east of the county. The parish is roughly bounded by land features such as Hopwell Park to the north, Church Wilne reservoir to the east, the River Derwent to the south, and the long-distance path Derwent Valley Heritage Way to the west.
Settlements There are areas of built environment mainly to the middle and very south of the parish, outside of this being essentially rural with dispersed settlements and farms throughout. The main locales are:
Draycott Church Wilne
Draycott
This is to the centre east of the parish, hemmed in between the Nottingham and Derby railway line to the north and the River Derwent in the south. It is the core settled location of the parish, taking up prominence in the title as it is the largest urban area. Draycott maintains village centre services such as food stores and hospitality, other retail, school and the core housing stock for the area.
Church Wilne
Lying to the south east of Draycott, this is a hamlet, with very few residences, these being some way from the location. Key buildings and features include a medieval church, nature reserve and a factory.
Routes The key road is the A52 trunk road between the two cities of Derby and Nottingham, which bypasses the population centres and briefly cuts through the far north of the parish, although there is no direct access. The A6005 road is an alternative route between the cities which goes directly through Draycott. The B5010 forms much of the north and north westernmost edge of the parish and runs between Borrowash and Risley.
Environment
Landscape The area lies on the banks of the River Derwent and its valley, and is relatively flat, the land rising gradually to the north of the parish, with no hills. The parish outside of Draycott village is primarily farmland. Areas of trees are few, with a small coppice to the north west, and a cluster surrounding St Chad's Water at Church Wilne.
Geology Throughout much of the southern areas of the parish and surrounding the River Derwent, the bedrock of the parish consists of mudstones, siltstones and sandstones of various types, formed between 250 and 200 million years ago during the Triassic period. Also throughout the area are sand and gravel deposits due to the geological feature known as the Allenton Terrace, which is the fluvial terrace of alluvium in the lower valley of the River Derwent that the area is built upon. This is notably around Church Wilne where historic mining took place.
Hydrological features The parish southern edge is mainly formed by the River Derwent, although there are deviations from this either by the course of the river changing over time or following field boundaries on its banks. At Church Wilne a millrace was formed for a historic mill, and some of this channel is culverted to allow access to a factory presently located there. The hamlet also hosts St. Chad's Water, a repurposed gravel quarry that is flooded and is now a nature reserve. Work is presently ongoing by a charity trust to re-water the former Derby Canal, one of the first areas being worked on is a mile-long stretch north of Draycott. Although the Church Wilne Water Treatment Works and associated reservoir (which hosts the Church Wilne Water Sports Centre) are named after the hamlet, those facilities are within the adjacent Breaston civil parish. A related piece of infrastructure which runs alongside this, the Leicester branch of the Upper Derwent Valley aqueduct, does however come through the north east of the Draycott and Church Wilne parish.
Land elevation The parish is relatively low lying being within the Derwent Valley, its lowest point is along the far south boundary along the River Derwent by Church Wilne, at . The land rises towards the north and west, with Draycott village marginally higher, in the range of . The highest section is adjacent to the far north parish boundary, within an area hemmed in by the B5010 and A52 roads by the Hill Top farm at .
History
Toponymy Only Draycott was listed in the Domesday 1086 landholding survey as Draicot or Dry Cote which was thought to mean ‘dry place’.
Wilne was first noted soon after in very late 11th century records and stood for ‘clearing in the willows’. It was alternatively later known as Little Wilne to help distinguish it from Great Wilne.
Parish and environment
Prehistory to Victorian era and early economy
The area has unearthed very few prehistoric and early history remains, such as a flint knife of Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age origin (3000 BC to 1501 BC) found in topsoil in a field to the south-east of Draycott. Also in the same area, a Bronze Age cremation cemetery, found human remains dated to the period 1600 BC to 1001 BC. A Late Bronze Age sword which was found by a machine operator during gravel extraction during the later 20th century at Church Wilne. The present day A6005 road from Derby which branches off to Sawley is an old Roman road during that era (43 AD to 409 AD) from Little Chester to the River Trent at Sawley which cannot be precisely dated but was probably built shortly after the establishment of a Roman fort at Little Chester during the 80s AD, and used by the Romans for efficient movement of soldiers, as well as to get Derbyshire lead to the Trent Lock area by the River Trent. It is possible that Church Wilne was the earlier settlement in the 7th or 8th century as St Chad established a base there by 670AD to spread Christianity through what was then the Kingdom of Mercia, and a church was recorded there in 822AD.
By the time of the Domesday survey in 1086, the area was part of Morlestan wapentake, and associated to Sawley, which became an extensive parish containing the chapelries of Wilne, Long-Eaton, Breason, Risley and the hamlets of Draycott and Hopwell. Domesday records: "in Salle, and Dracot, and Opeuuelle (Hopwell), a priest and two churches, a mill, one fishery, and thirty acres of meadow." The two churches were likely to have been Sawley and Church Wilne. The area at this time was held by the Bishop of Lichfield (St Chad being an earlier archbishop) but was recorded in Domesday as the Bishop of Chester as the diocese had briefly moved there during the period. It is thought that Draycott and Church Wilne by this time were one and the same and initially based by Church Wilne, only Draycott being called out in the 1086 survey possibly due to Wilne not liable to tax because of church ownership.
Residual traces of earthworks close to the church were found in the late 1960s and middle 1970s as evidence of a deserted medieval village, with possible medieval walls, foundations and pottery unearthed from the ploughed fields adjacent to the church, providing additional proof of extensive occupation. Great Wilne, across the River Derwent to the south, developed at a much later period, and was first recorded in the middle-late 13th century, although of the two Wilne communities ended up being the larger settlement. However, up to the Victorian period, journals recorded as many as 30 houses and a population of 140 in Wilne. It is possible water level issues throughout the Derwent floodplain probably began an exodus of locals towards slightly higher ground alongside a key transportation route, the Roman road. Some early topographic, documentary, cartographic and excavation evidence shows Wilne church may have been enclosed on as many as three sides by medieval meanders of the Derwent. There are several examples of medieval farming with ridge and furrow techniques to the south of Draycott and surrounding Church Wilne.
Certainly by the end of the 11th century soon after Domesday, Church Wilne began having individualised records in ecclesiastical and other administration documents. The ownership of the Sawley/Draycott/Church Wilne manors stayed with the diocese for some centuries, and after the Dissolution of the monasteries it was leased to the Stanhope family by the 1540s, of which the Earl of Harrington was their later peerage. William Stanhope (1683 to 1756) was made Earl of Harrington in 1742. His descendants including Charles Stanhope (1844 to 1917), the eighth Earl of Harrington held the manor into the 20th century. Wilne became an ecclesiastical parish in 1822, partitioned from Sawley ancient parish and at the time included Hopwell hamlet, Draycott liberty along with Breaston and Risley chapelries. These were all by 1866 separated out and the civil parish of Draycott and Church Wilne created.
Early transport Draycott informally is known as Neddy Town and locals known as Neddies. In earlier modern times, donkey drawn carts from the coalfields of the north hauled this output to the waterways. The Market Place was a key stopover point where donkeys were changed over and is the origin of the nickname as the term 'neddy' is in informal usage within some parts of England but was also applied at Draycott. The relocation of locals increased into the 18th and 19th centuries as Victorian infrastructure such as roads, canals, railways, electricity and industry were brought to Draycott. A Nottingham to Derby turnpike trust was established and road built along the top and western edge of the parish from 1759, which is the modern B5010 road between Risley and Borrowash, and a milepost was placed along the route. Derby Canal was built through the middle of the parish, skirting the north of Draycott and opened in 1793. It provided an alternative to using the Derwent for navigation, which could be awkward at certain times of the year during floods or dry weather. The Midland Counties Railway was built in 1837-1839 paralleling the canal, but diverged from it towards Sawley, where both met the road to Derby.
Mills The parish was a notable later period industrial centre in Derbyshire, a key local development was the construction of mills. Although the 1086 Domesday Book reported a mill within Sawley with suggestions it was at Wilne, there was a later discovery of a 12th-century mill at Sawley village. Wilne Mills was the first local mill reported in estate records from 1536, owned by the Earls of Harrington and a millrace and weir created to help channel water through the site, forming an island which it was based on. It had many proprietors over the following centuries, involved in several activities from grinding corn to textile manufacture. Up to the early 1900s it was concerned with cotton and had its operations being overseen by Marcus Astle, but the mills burnt down in 1917. The site was rebuilt in 1924 and still involved primarily textiles and the Astle family until after World War II.