Image s11854 from the collections in Sheffield Local Studies Library, used with kind permission
'Afternoon Stroll from Sheffield', a sketch from 'St. George's Museums', Pall Mall Gazette, 14 May 1886
Or like a rainbow laughing
O'er Rivelin and Don
When misty morning calleth up
Her mountains one by one.'
['St. George's Museums',
Pall Mall Gazette, 14 May 1886]
The Rivelin Valley and Ebenezer ElliottEbenezer Elliot, the Corn-Law Rhymer mentioned above, was an iron-merchant who had taken up residence in Upperthorpe. In his most famous work,
Corn Law Rhymes (1831) he campaigned against the Corn Laws, which he regarded as a subsidy for the rich and a 'bread-tax' on the poor. When he was not tending his business or rhyming, he spent time botanising in the Rivelin Valley. His biographer, John Watkins, describes a walk that the pair took there in December 1838:
'After breakfast we sallied forth, and took our course up a hill, till the vale of the Rivilin [sic] opened to our view, which he described with the eye of a painter. The mills on the stream, and the weirs belonging to them, made a succession of beautiful landscapes. We looked in at one of those mills, and saw an old man of thirty, a grinder. He said they seldom reached forty, yet would not use the grinder's life-preserver [...] We walked about five miles up the valley, till we came to a streamlet which he had christened Ribbledin, from the music of its waters as it flowed. We came to a little waterfall at the head. He said it was Nature's boudoir, and indeed, it might have served for a fountain for Diana. After crossing the stream on bridges of fallen trees, and remarking the great age of the hollies, we clambered, with some difficulty, which he made light of, up a rocky ascent, and returned by the moors' (John Watkins, Life, Poetry, and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott, The Corn-Law Rhymer (London: John Mortimer, 1850), pp. 141-2