Place:Fairfield, Derbyshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Fairfield is now a district of Buxton in Derbyshire, located on the A6 road half a mile to the northeast of the town centre. The historic village of Fairfield was centred around a village green (known as 'the Green').

Cistercian monks and Benedictine nuns founded monastic granges at Fairfield in the early 1200s AD (Nunsfield Farm still exists). In the 13th century Fairfield (being north of the River Wye) was within the Royal Forest of Peak, a hunting ground for the king. Fairfield was a chapelry in the parish of Hope (whereas Buxton was in the Bakewell parish). Fairfield and Buxton shared a medieval corn mill on the Wye in Mill Dale, where Ashwood Park is now.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"FAIRFIELD, a chapelry in Hope parish, Derby[shire]; near the Buxton railway, 1 mile ENE of Buxton. It has a post office under Buxton. Acres: 3,914. Real property: £6,093; of which £61 are in gas-works. Population in 1851: 574; in 1861: 1,075. Houses: 185. The manor belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. The living is a vicarage, in the diocese of Lichfield. Value: £160. Patrons: Trustees. The church was rebuilt in 1839. There is a Wesleyan chapel. An endowed school has £39."

Governance

Fairfield became a town in its own right, complete with town council [date not given in Wikipedia]. The township covered the land north of the River Wye, including The Park and Devonshire Park, until 1859 when a boundary change moved them into Buxton town. Fairfield remained an urban sanitary district until 1894 when it became an urban district. and in 1917 it became part of Buxton Urban District Council. As it joined Buxton, the most rural section of Fairfield was split off to become the parish of Green Fairfield (with an area of 1666 acres and 345 inhabitants).

Churches

The first chapel was built in Fairfield between 1240 and 1255. Fairfield Church was built in c.1595 and was demolished in 1838 to be replaced by the present St. Peter's (Church of England). Lying just north of the 'Green', the church was built in 1839, designed by William Swan, the village schoolmaster. St Peter's is a Grade II listed building. John Wesley visited Fairfleld in September 1784. The present Fairfield Wesleyan chapel on Waterswallows Road was built in 1868, replacing the first Methodist chapel which was erected in 1844.

Research Tips

• Derbyshire Record Office website
• British History Online (Victoria County Histories) does not appear to cover Derbyshire geographically. A History of the County of Derby: Volume 2, edited by William Page is a part-volume covering the religious houses of the county. No further volumes have been found.
• GENUKI main page for Derbyshire which provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Derbyshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• For a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from the following selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile. Sections of the 1900 map showing parish boundaries only have been reproduced on some (but not all) parish pages here in WeRelate.

• Map of Derbyshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
• Map of Derbyshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were some changes in urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.
• Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire for 1967 This is the last in this series and was made while Derbyshire was experimenting with the non-metropolitan district structure adopted in 1974. It is a much cleaner map for reading the names of the civil parishes, but the smaller villages are no longer visible.

These are only three of the series of maps to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time.

• Wikimedia Commons map of the post-1974 districts of Derbyshire. The numbers will be linked to the districts on the WeRelate district pages.
• Wikimedia Commons often provides a map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds", but there does not appear to be one for Derbyshire. This 1832 Ordnance Survey map from A Vision of Britain through Time is not as good as those in the Wikimedia Commons series.
• Derbyshire family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
• Towns and Villages of Derbyshire and the Peak District is a locally produced website designed for tourists.