Administrative Boundary of Derbyshire

About Derbyshire

Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. Covering approximately 2,551 square kilometres from the gritstone moors of the northern Peak District to the coal-measure lowlands of the south, Derbyshire had a population of approximately 790,000 at the 2021 Census (excluding the unitary authority of Derby). The county encompasses the Peak District — England's first National Park — some of the finest country houses in England including Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall, the birthplace of the factory system at Cromford, and the spa town of Buxton. The Peak District The Peak District National Park — designated in 1951 as England's first National Park — covers approximately 1,440 square kilometres of upland landscape straddling Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire. The northern Dark Peak is dominated by gritstone moorland — vast, high, austere, crossed by some of the finest long-distance walking in Britain (the Pennine Way begins on Kinder Scout, the highest point of the Peak District at 636 metres) and encompassing dramatic gritstone edges including Stanage Edge, Froggatt Edge, and Curbar Edge. The southern White Peak is limestone country — deep, sinuous dales (Dove Dale, the Manifold Valley, Lathkill Dale) cut through pale grey carboniferous limestone, scattered with ancient lead mining remains, dry stone walls, and market towns. Buxton, on the western edge of the Peak District, is the highest market town in England at approximately 307 metres, and was a major spa resort developed by the Duke of Devonshire in the 18th century; the Crescent (1780–1789, John Carr of York), echoing the Royal Crescent in Bath, is the centrepiece of Georgian Buxton. Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall Chatsworth House, in the Derwent Valley near Bakewell, is the principal seat of the Duke of Devonshire and one of the grandest and most magnificent country houses in England. The present house, built largely 1686–1707 in baroque style and extensively enlarged in the 1820s by the 6th Duke, contains one of the finest private art collections in Britain — paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts of exceptional quality — and stands in a landscape park designed partly by Capability Brown, with the spectacular cascade fountain garden rising 100 metres behind the house. Haddon Hall, further along the Wye valley from Chatsworth, is an extraordinarily well-preserved medieval and Tudor manor house with stone walls, a long gallery, a great hall, and terraced gardens; it has changed little since the Tudor period and is widely regarded as the most complete and romantic medieval manor house in England. The Derwent Valley Mills The Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site — designated by UNESCO in 2001 — extends along the River Derwent from Cromford in the south to Matlock Bath, Belper, Milford, and Derby. At Cromford, Richard Arkwright built the world's first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill in 1771, effectively inventing the factory system — the model of centralised, mechanised production with a disciplined workforce that transformed industrial economies across the world. The sequence of mill villages along the Derwent preserves the physical infrastructure of the early Industrial Revolution better than anywhere else on earth. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Derbyshire County Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the ONS Open Geography Portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports National Park management, country house estate mapping, industrial heritage conservation, lead mining archaeology, and demographic analysis across the Derbyshire local authority area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Derbyshire county