Nurse Florence Nightingale's Derbyshire is explored by STEPHEN McCLARENCE

PAM RIVERS darts her fingers over her laptop. Suddenly, amazingly, we hear Florence Nightingale's voice echoing out of history into a room where she often spent her evenings.

Standing in her aunt's house, in the Derbyshire village of Cromford, it's like hearing a ghost. "When I'm no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life, " she says.

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Florence was 70 when the recording was made on a wax cylinder in 1890, more than 30 years after her nursing work in The Crimea that created the legend of "the lady with the lamp". She returned to the UK to settle in this little-explored area of Derbyshire centering on the small parish of Dethick, Lea and Holloway.

Here, the centenary of her death will be marked with a festival and the launch of two heritage trails this weekend.

We're spending the best part of two days in the parish, a few miles square and criss-crossed by footpaths and bridleways.

It is near Matlock on the edge of the Peak District and fewer than 10 miles from enduringly popular Chatsworth House, but feels refreshingly remote from the regular tourist trail.

Florence spent some of her childhood here and returned in later life to nurse her great aunt in the house - now the home of Pam Rivers, the lady with the laptop.

Pam is secretary of the Florence Nightingale Derbyshire Association, which promotes awareness of Florence's links with the area. "Many don't know her family roots were around here, " says Pam's husband John, the chairman, as he gives out details of the new walking and driving trails my wife and I have come to preview.

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We've driven here along winding hilly lanes lined by dry-stone walls. We pass late foxgloves and early blackberry bushes and, not far from Pudding Pie Hill, the alarmingly named Bleak House, which looks extremely cosy.

And then, in the village of Holloway, it's on with the walking boots to start one trail with a glimpse of Lea Hurst, the sturdy stone house which was the wealthy Nightingale family's summer home.

Fanny, Florence's mother, found it too cold in winter and too small generally.

Florence loved it but admitted: "It has only 15 bedrooms."

Later it became a retirement home for nurses. "You would see them walking across the meadow to go to church, " says John Gregory, secretary of the village's Florence Nightingale Memorial Hall. The hall lures Nightingale groupies but there's not much memorabilia aside from a framed print of Florence nursing in a Crimean hospital.

"A party of Japanese tourists came bounding through the door once, " says treasurer Dave Carless. "I was painting panto scenery and they just started snapping away."

On through woods and tunnels of horse chestnut and honeysuckle we go, past allotments and market gardens and lots of men with wheelbarrows.

In the village of Lea we take in the eponymous hall, another rather stern-looking Nightingale childhood home. Lea Gardens (with its renowned café) offers almost Himalayan hillsides of rhododendrons and azaleas.

So much of the landscape is inspiring, particularly around Dethick, a quiet hamlet of three farms and a church.

We're staying here in a B&B full of character and run by former Blue Peter presenter Simon Groom and his wife Gilly.

The property, Manor Farm, is a smart place, partly medieval.

When your bedroom has a chaise-longue as well as a bed you know you're in good hands.

Turn left out of the farm's front door and follow the walled path around the tall-towered church and an astonishing panorama emerges. With wooded hills, hedgerows, grazing sheep, swooping swallows and utter peace, it's the sort of enchanted landscape exiles dream about.

As the sun sets, we walk down the long meadow to Lea for dinner at the Jug & Glass, a traditional real ale pub-cuminn in former 18th-century weavers' cottages. Later, John Rivers drives us around the new heritage car trail which offers a human dimension to the legend.

We see Whatstandwell station platform where Florence got off the train from London after her return from The Crimea. And, in Cromford, we view an exhibition about her life and work which includes a startling photograph of her aged 86 - bedridden but still unmistakably doughty.

THE KNOWLEDGE:
Manor Farm (01629 534302/ www.manorfarmdethick.co.uk) offers doubles from £70 per night (two sharing), B&B. Florence Nightingale Exhibition (01629 823256/www.arkwrightsociety.org.uk) runs until August 31, at Cromford Mill, Derbyshire.

Heritage car/walk trail guides available from Matlock Bath Tourist Information: 01629 583388.

Discover East Midlands: www.discovereastmidlands.com