Peter Fidler memorial and nature reserve

Peter Fidler is said to have been as important to  the development of Canada as Captain Cook was to the rest of the British Empire.

His story of how he worked his way up from being a labourer(signing a 5 year contract in 1788) with the Hudson Bay company to being one of their most important surveyors and the first person to have mapped accurately the hinterland on the North American continent is fascinating.

He became a resourceful explorer, able to live off the land and took valuable  lessons from the native peoples that he met. He married a Cree woman (Mary) who travelled widely with him and they had 14 children. He travelled widely by horseback and canoe and whilst on the trail he dressed in buckskin. However back in the company settlements he was regarded as a cultured English gentleman. 

The memorial is in a local nature reserve at Bolsover, Derbyshire which also bears his name and is just a few hundred yards from the site of Sutton Mill, where he was born. The stone cairn has two metal plates providing information about the man who was largely forgotten in the town of his birth until the Derbyshire County Council started looking for a name for the nature reserve they were establishing on the site of a closed coal mine around 2000.  Since the reserve opened, however, the town has taken on remembeing him with some enthusiasm. The memorial was unveiled in 2004. The grave of his father can be seen in the local churchyard.

After one of the established surveyors of the Hudson Bay Company broke his leg   Peter Fidler got his own big break (pun certainly intended) in 1790. Fidler had been only recently trained in surveying but he got a chance to go on an expedition to find a route to  link Hudson Bay with the Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabaska  regions. The surveys  he came back with were fundamental to opening up the west of the North American continent and were later published to form part of an atlas of the region by Aaron Arrowsmith. In his further travels he was the first European to report cactus in Canada, coal in the prairies and the first to write about the Athabaska tar deposits.

Peter Fidler only returned to Bolsover once, in 1811. Having made his fortune he stayed for a year and built his mother a house, which is now the Castle Inn in the town, before returning to Canada. He died aged 53 at Fort Dauphin where there is a memorial very similar to the one at Bolsover.

The nature reserve has very good wildlife including some really nice dragonflies. It forms one of a number of nature reserves in the Doe Lee valley linked together by a public footpath called the a Stockley  Trail. Within the nature reserve are also some good examples of public art.