You've gotta be a hardcore hillfort fan to visit Markland Grips as what's visible on the ground is a bit of a let down.
Kinda tongue shaped the fort is protected on two sides by ravines; Hollinhill Grips and Markland Grips the west side by ramparts and ditches. The whole place is overgrown a hedge grows along the top of the banking, and the ditch is near impossible to find.
The entrance in the centre is thought to belong to the fort.
The clearest part of the earthworks is on the otherside of the railway banking, where the ending of three ramparts can be seen.
One evening in the early 1900s a miner, who had just finished working at Creswell Colliery, thought he'd call in on his fancy woman in Creswell. He was safe because her own husband had just started his shift down the pit. After a bit of courting he set off for his own home in Clowne. He was striding up over Markland Craggs when he looked up ahead of him - and there was the Devil standing there, silhouetted by the full moon. Now really you'd think the Devil would be impressed by a bit of philandering, but apparently he cursed the man, and sent him home white-haired and mumbling gibberish. His own wife was not impressed and he was of no use to man nor beast thereafter.
This tale is described in Liz Linahan's 1996 'More Pit Ghosts, Padfeet and Poltergeists'. Her informant told her he'd heard it from a woman who'd been told it in the 1920s, and liked repeating for the benefit of her poor husband. Even if it's only a scare story to put off straying husbands, perhaps it still suggests that Markland Grips is not the sort of place you'd want to be on a dark night.
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Posted by Rhiannon
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