Continuing on,[3] it passes through one of the seven arches of Unstone Viaduct, built in 1870 as part of the Chesterfield to Sheffield line of the Midland Railway.

[6] The river passes east of Unstone Green, where it is crossed by Whittington Lane and then the B6057 road at Brierley Bridge.

It runs along the south-west border of Old Whittington, where it is crossed by the B6052 road, and the final bridge carries another railway, the line to Sheffield via Barrow Hill.

[3] In the late 1990s the river burst its banks and flooded Dronfield 'bottom' shopping area, and as a result a flood storage reservoir was built at Bowshaw to hold back (attenuate) the storm water runoff from the Batemoor and Jordanthorpe housing estates in the south of Sheffield, which form part of the catchment area.

[citation needed] The river used to feed several water wheels at early factories in the Dronfield valley in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This long-term record shows that the drainage basin of 50 square kilometres (19 sq mi) to the gauging station yielded an average flow of 0.8 cubic metres per second (28 cu ft/s).

[8] The locations of other sites that used water power in Dronfield are marked by at least four dams, built in the 18th century to supply mills and workshops, as the river banks became industrialised to support the iron and coal industries.

However, the industries were in decline by the time the railway arrived in 1870, and many houses became vacant when the steelworks relocated to Workington in 1881, taking large numbers of workers with them.

The site can be identified by the river channels, but there are few structural remains of the buildings, although small sections of wall were still visible in 1980.

At the trial, Rotherham maintained that Barker had stolen them because of his own anti-Union sentiment, and the stealing of tools was a common tactic at the time.

There were several incidents involving explosives between then and 1863, when in June an attempt to blow up his warehouse, which was attached to the house where five members of his family lived, failed to detonate.

After his death on 4 December 1870, the manufacturing of sickles was handled by two of his grandsons, who opened new premises at Unstone Mill in 1873, but the business failed less than a year later.

The work, for which detailed records are held in Chesterfield Borough Library, was commissioned by the Duke of Devonshire and cost £195-12s-8d.

[14] In 1886 the Elliot family, who were running the mill, took legal action against the Chesterfield Rural Sanitary Authority, alleging that they were in breach of their authorising Act of Parliament.

The judge found in their favour, and ruled that water could only be extracted when the flow of the brook exceeded 150 cubic feet (4.2 m3) per minute.

The river has not been classed as good quality because of physical modification of the channel, and because it is affected by discharges from sewage treatment works.

Like many rivers in the UK, the chemical status changed from good to fail in 2019 because of the presence of cypermethrin, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), perfluorooctane sulphonate (PFOS), and mercury compounds, none of which had previously been included in the assessment.