Things you didn't know about Derbyshire

Every Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, the town of Ashbourne in Derbyshire hosts the Shrovetide Football Match between those born to the north and south of the River Henmore, a tradition dating back to well before Elizabethan times. Up to 10,000 players compete over the two days with a hand-painted, cork-filled ball.

Best known for her work during in the Crimean War and for establishing nursing institutions in London, Florence Nightingale was also the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for mathematical models that she developed. Her long-time summer residence was in Lea, in Derbyshire.

Engineer Henry Royce and car dealer CS Rolls jointly formed Rolls-Royce in 1906, and the following year produced the Silver Ghost, revered at the time as the greatest car in the world. It was built for 20 years at the company's Derbyshire factory in Nightingale Road, Derby.

Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb, was born in Ripley, Derbyshire, in 1887. While working at Vickers, he was also responsible for designing one of the most successful airships of all time, the R100, and then pioneered the use of geodesic design in aircraft engineering, applying it to the fuselage of the Wellington bomber.

In 1719, John Lombe saw the completion of his Derby Silk Mill, now recognised as arguably the world's first modern factory. Built on the river Derwent in Derbyshire, the facility housed Lombe's patented machinery for winding, spinning and twisting raw silk, designs that were allegedly copied from an Italian by his stepbrother. When Lombe died in 1722, it was thought that he'd been poisoned by a woman sent from Italy to take revenge.

Ellen MacArthur, the world's most successful female sailor, grew up in Whatstandwell, near Matlock in Derbyshire, halfway between Derby and Chesterfield.

Born in the village of Melbourne, in Derbyshire, Thomas Cook arranged his first paid-for excursion in 1841 with an 11-mile train journey from Leicester to Loughborough. By the time he died in 1892, his company was arranging tours across Europe, America and around the world.

The church of Our Lady and All Saints in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, has a famously twisted spire that leans some nine feet to the south. The spire was built straight with the rest of the church in the 14th century, but it's thought that unseasoned timber caused the dramatic twisting that began several centuries later.