COOKSPRING WOOD is located in the Moss Valley, roughly five and a half miles North East of Dronfield and one mile North East of Coal Aston and lies behond the North West boundary with Owler Carr Wood.
Cookspring Wood lies on the South bank of a brook called "The Moss" that flows Eastward and eventually joins the River Rother.
A few centuries ago the wood was worked as a coppice plantation, where men felled the standard mature trees almost at ground level (this is what's called coppicing), the felled trees were then cut into logs and stacked in a whitecoal kiln earth in the shape of a beehive and burnt very slowly from the inside outwards to form whitecoal or charcoal, the whitecoal or charcoal was then used to line furnaces in the iron industries of nearby Sheffield.
Not all the standard mature trees were felled at the same time, and so luckily in Cookspring Wood it is still possible to see a few trees aged well over two hundred years old.
Forming the East Boundary of the wood is a little stream called "Lovers' Leap". Folklore has it that if a young couple in the 18th. Century wanted to get married they were brought to Lovers' Leap, where they were tied together and forced to leap across the stream from the East Bank to the West Bank. If the couple succeeded they were then classd as a married couple. If the couple failed and fell into the stream the maiden was classed as a witch and tied to a stake and burnt alive.
So next time you venture from Cookspring Wood into Owler Carr Wood do so by the wooden footbridge, for it is not always safe to leap. read more
