The poet Newton had provided the town with a water supply by having
pipes laid at his own expense from the Well Head at the source of the
stream which flowed out of an old lead-mine. Lead in drinking-water has
an evil name for causing poisoning, but the Tideswell folk flourish on
it, since no one seems to think of dying before seventy, and a goodly
number live to over ninety.
They have some small industries, cotton manufacture having spread from
Lancashire into these remote districts. It is an old-fashioned place,
with houses mostly stuccoed with broken crystals and limestone from the
"Rakes" and containing curiously carved cupboard doors and posts torn
from churches ornamented in Jacobean style by the sacrilegious
Cromwellians, many of them having been erected just after the Great
Rebellion.
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF BRIDGEWATER.]
[Illustration: BRIDGE CARRYING THE CANAL OVERHEAD.]
We now journeyed along the mountain track until it descended sharply
into Miller's Dale; but before reaching this place we were interested in
the village of Formhill, where Brindley, the famous canal engineer, was
born in 1716. Brindley was employed by the great Duke of Bridgewater,
the pioneer of canal-making in England, to construct a canal from his
collieries at Worsley, in Lancashire, to Manchester, in order to cheapen
the cost of coal at that important manufacturing centre.
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