Coffin Lane at Ashover. https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/magazines/derbyshire/22632652.county-walk---ashover/
Ever heard of a corpse road? Perhaps where you live, you might be more familiar with the term ‘coffin walk’. A corpse road is not, in fact, somewhere that is renowned for the dead wandering along it, though this is commonly recorded, instead, a corpse road or coffin walk is the route taken by pallbearers, when transporting a coffin to the nearest burial ground. We often assume that all churches had cemeteries, but this was not always the case. Many places of Christian worship, in the past, were just small chapels, where people would congregate for prayers and sermons, but, more important rituals, such as births, deaths and marriages had to take place at the nearest church, which could have been a few miles away.
Corpse roads developed as the preferred routes for carrying coffins from outlying villages, to cemeteries in larger settlements. On some of these you might still find a coffin or corpse stone. This is where weary pallbearers stopped to rest the coffin, while they took a well-earned rest. Whilst corpse roads were created for entirely practical reasons, they have attracted an understandably dark reputation, with a plethora of ghost stories, concerning spirits eternally pursuing their own coffins, to their final resting places.
Like any other county, Derbyshire has its own corpse roads:
A particularly pithy insult from the area once went “I hope I shall live to see thy coffin walk!" I think we can safely assume that they were not referring to a coffin sprouting legs!
© Simon Unsworth 2025
Corpse roads developed as the preferred routes for carrying coffins from outlying villages, to cemeteries in larger settlements. On some of these you might still find a coffin or corpse stone. This is where weary pallbearers stopped to rest the coffin, while they took a well-earned rest. Whilst corpse roads were created for entirely practical reasons, they have attracted an understandably dark reputation, with a plethora of ghost stories, concerning spirits eternally pursuing their own coffins, to their final resting places.
Like any other county, Derbyshire has its own corpse roads:
- Breaston: The Coffin Walk, in the small town of Breaston, is a popular local route, which takes travellers from Breaston to the old Saxon church of St Chad’s, on the banks of the river Derwent. About halfway along, you’ll find the remains of where the original coffin stone once stood.
- Ashover: In Ashover, an old packhorse trail, lined, in places, with ancient stones, marks the route of a path that heads out of town and to the nearby village of Alton.
- Hollins Cross: Down from Mam Tor lies Hollins Cross, probably the most famous junction of pathways in the Peak District. From here, a coffin road plummets down to the village of Edale - probably the most arduous corpse road in Derbyshire!
- Highlow: From the tiny hamlet of Highlow a route known as the Corpse Path runs to the churchyard at Hathersage.
- Lullington: A corpse road runs south, from the village of Coton-in-the-Elms to Lullington (thanks to Barry Thomas, Melbourne Historical Research Group).
A particularly pithy insult from the area once went “I hope I shall live to see thy coffin walk!" I think we can safely assume that they were not referring to a coffin sprouting legs!
© Simon Unsworth 2025