• As webmistress of the Matlock website I've collected a great deal of information about some areas of Cromford. Matlock and Matlock Bath addresses, in particular those in Scarthin, advertised in Cromford Trade Directories. A good deal of the history of the village is tied up with, and many records of Cromford are amongst, the information of the adjacent parishes of Matlock and Matlock Bath, as well as with that of Wirksworth.
  View the One Place Study of Matlock & District elsewhere on this website.
  
  
• Martin Rowley generously provided me with photocopies of three trade directory extracts about Cromford, specifically for this website. Neil Wilson was also generous with his transcription of Whites (1857).
  
  

Below is a description of Cromford's Black Rocks, extracted from an early twentieth century book about Derbyshire.

Firth, J.B. (1908) "Highways and Byways in Derbyshire" MacMillan & Co., London, pp. 414 - 416

CHAPTER XXVIII
From Cromford the road to Wirksworth ascends for a long mile with toilsome steepness. Slowly it shakes itself clear of houses, and then on the left hand we see the famous Cromford or Black Rocks, frowning down the valley in solemn and sombre dignity. If we leave the road and make our way towards them, we cross the High Peak Railway, which, regardless of gradients, however desperate, has come climbing up from the river side, two miles out of Cromford. The rocks lose their dense blackness when we approach them, and are seen to be of no deeper colour than grey as they stand out from the face of the hill in a series of bastions of irregular outline and varying size. The slope, covered with brushwood and shrubs down to the railway, is littered with the débris of the hill top-huge boulders which have fallen with resounding crash in bygone ages. The Black Rocks provide ample opportunity for the crags man to show his endurance and the fool his folly in attempting to scale them. For us the less heroic approach from the side of the adjoining quarry!

From the top, the view towards Matlock is superb, despite the mills at the entrance to the Lovers' Walks, for the rich woods lie in dense masses on the lower slopes of Masson, and the gorges of the Derwent are a perfect delight. Cromford lies picturesquely below us with Willersley Castle and its trees for a charming background, and the eye can follow round from the summit of Riber to the woods of Lea Hurst. To the left the high ground is barer, and the cliffs above Middleton have been torn and gashed by the quarrymen, whose handiwork you can trace along the ridges towards Wirksworth. Here, too, one sees better the peculiarities of the Black Rocks themselves. Their base lies in the hill side, some eighty feet below, and they are divided into five great bastions, detached from one another by deep clefts. Each has its name, each its own fantastic shape. A pine tree grows on the furthest bastion on the Wirksworth side. But the finest of the series is one which looks as though it had been built of successive deep layers of rock, the topmost one projecting from the edge, and each layer worn deeply away where it rests upon the one below.

Rejoining the road, and escaping from the region of the railway bridges and embankments, we soon drop down into Wirksworth, the gigantic quarries on the right contrasting with the unscarred green slopes on the left, at the foot of which lies the little town.