Etwall is a quiet village in the south of Derbyshire, between Derby and the River Dove, with a church, almshouses and old brick houses. It sits on the edge of a district full of history, and a short ride in any direction brings something worth stopping for.
Repton, a few miles south, was the capital of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, and its church has a crypt where Mercian kings were buried. In the winter of 873, a Viking army camped here, and archaeologists have found their defences and graves. The village is now known for its public school, founded in the sixteenth century.
Swarkestone Bridge, to the east, is a long medieval causeway across the Trent floodplain, and it marks the southernmost point reached by Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army in 1745, before it turned back to Scotland and defeat. A plaque records the moment.
Closer to Etwall, the Toyota factory at Burnaston builds cars on the site of an old airfield, and its huge sheds are visible from the A50. The A38 and A50 meet nearby, making this a convenient place to refuel on the way north.
Ignore the dual carriageways if you have time. The lanes west towards the Dove and Tutbury, where a ruined castle on a sandstone bluff once held Mary Queen of Scots, are quiet and gently bending, with red-brick farms and long views across the river meadows. Fill up before you leave the trunk roads, since the villages are small; Derby is the fallback if the local pumps disappoint.