On the ridge above Ecton stands a squat stone building that once housed a steam engine. It was put up in 1788 to designs by Boulton & Watt, and it is thought to be the oldest surviving mine winding engine house in the world. The National Trust looks after it now. The hill it sits on, Ecton Hill, rises to 369 metres and is honeycombed underneath with old shafts — 3,500 years of them.
Ecton is a scattered hamlet in the Manifold Valley, deep in the Staffordshire Moorlands. There is no pub here, no shop, and no church. What runs through it is the River Manifold and the Manifold Way, a mostly traffic-free trail on the bed of the old Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway. The track is surfaced and largely level — good for prams, wheelchairs, bikes and horses — and it passes straight through the village. Just south of Ecton it joins a single-track B-road for about a mile, so "traffic-free" comes with an asterisk.
For food and a bed you walk or drive a short way. Hulme End, a mile north, has the trailhead, the visitor centre, the Tea Junction Café and cycle hire. It also has the Manifold Inn, a mellow stone coaching inn on the banks of the river that opened in 1782 as the Jolly Carter and has changed its name five times since. There is a recent outside bar in the top field.
Two miles west at Warslow is the Greyhound Inn, whose landlord built a brewery on site. The house beers include Fiery Fred, Manifold Mild, and one called Ecton Copper — named for the mine.
The mine is the reason Ecton exists. By 1790 the Deep Ecton was said to be the richest individual copper mine in England, employing 400 men, women and children and producing 4,000 tons of ore a year. The Duke of Devonshire leased it, then worked it himself from 1760. The 1780s shaft went down more than 300 metres below the River Manifold — below sea level, deeper than the Eiffel Tower is tall. James Watt designed the world's first tapered ropes here to haul the ore up. Miners worked six-week contracts, sometimes for no pay if they struck nothing, and a timber bench where they ate their lunch still survives underground.
Copper from Ecton lined Royal Navy hulls, became coinage, and made brass. The Duke's profits, nearly £333,000, are said to have funded The Crescent at Buxton, twenty-five minutes away. The mine closed in 1891 when the ore ran out. The railway followed in 1934, and the Express Dairies creamery that had run milk trains to London closed two years before that.
Up the valley there is one more thing worth mentioning. In around 1922, Arthur Ratcliffe, the Conservative MP for Leek, bought a small building here for £11 and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a battlemented mock-medieval castle with turrets and a copper spire topped by a gold-leafed wooden ball. Interviewed in 1933, he wondered aloud whether he might pull it down and build a Swiss chalet instead, to tone with the surroundings. The house, as one writer noted, was hardly surrounded by alpine scenery.
