In a private house in Sheffield

During low water levels in 1991 at the Ladybower Reservoir in Derbyshire, a carved stone was noted by the author, protruding from the surface of the water in the vicinity of the submerged village of Derwent. The visible face appeared to be carved with an interlace pattern, similar to that seen on Darley Dale 1A, a view confirmed by Clive Hart, then Curator of Antiquities at Sheffield City Museum. A return was made to the site when the water levels had dropped further but, since the initial visit, the stone had been used for 'target practice' and the visible face broken away through bombardment by large stones. To recover the context of the discovery, a small excavation was carried out, where it was found that the stone had been reused as part of the surround of a domestic fireplace. The stone was removed for inspection but was found to be devoid of decoration. Three faces had clearly been dressed-off for reuse, the other destroyed a matter of days beforehand.

Broken fragment with no decoration

The decoration on the un-dressed face appeared to comprise a simple pattern of a two-stranded interlace. At the end of each diagonal of the interlace was a closed-circuit ring.

The location of the stone was within a small building known as Mill Cottage which was abandoned and inundated by the reservoir in the 1940s. The cottage was adjacent to the site of a chapel in Derwent village which was extant in 1688, replaced by a smaller building in 1757 and demolished in 1867 (Cox 1877a, 161). The original date of the chapel is unknown but it may have pre-dated the thirteenth century (Sidebottom 1993, 9-18). Cox noted that older material was reused in the chapel buildings and Hallam (1989, 21) notes that some of the chapel masonry was eventually used in the fabric of Mill Cottage. Derwent was located in the Upper Derwent Valley, a wider part of the valley at the confluence of the River Derwent and Mill Brook, and the probable site of an early settlement in the district which, given the presence of two pieces of cross-shaft and the possible early date of the chapel, might have included an ecclesiastical focus of some form.

Possibly tenth century

Sidebottom 1993, 9–18, fig. 4, pls. 1–4; Sidebottom 1994, 149, 244–5 (Derwent); Sharpe 2002, 109