Derbyshire is a historic county of the East Midlands, bounded by Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire and Warwickshire to the south, and Staffordshire to the west. Eighteenth-century surveys recorded it as nearly forty miles long, its northern half considerably broader than its narrow southern tip, and reckoned its population at close to 127,000 across eleven market towns and around a hundred parishes, seated in the diocese of Lichfield and Coventry. The county's landscape divides sharply between the wild limestone uplands of the Peak in the north-west and the gentler, richer farmland of the south and east.
The Peak, though its climate was accounted sharp and cold, was far from unproductive: its bleak hills yielded lead, marble, alabaster, millstones, iron and coal in quantity, along with a distinctive local crystal, while the lower valleys nearby offered good grazing. The principal rivers, the Derwent and the Dove, both rise in the Peak; the Derwent runs the length of the county to join the Trent below Derby, while the Dove marks much of the boundary with Staffordshire before it too joins the Trent near Burton. By the later eighteenth century, improved inland navigation linked these rivers into a network reaching the Mersey, Severn, Humber and Thames, opening Derbyshire's mineral wealth to markets across the country.
The Peak's dramatic caves and gorges — the cavern known as the Devil's Arse near Castleton, the deep ravine of Dovedale, and the springs at Matlock and Buxton — drew antiquarian travellers as celebrated natural curiosities, forerunners of the county's later reputation as a destination for scenery and spa-going. Chatsworth, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire on the banks of the Derwent, and the nearby Haddon Hall stood, then as now, among the most admired houses in England, testifying to Derbyshire's long-standing wealth from land, lead and stone.