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| A retaining wall on Montgomery Road |
A few days after my brief investigation of the Loxley Edge Rock at Loxley Edge, I took advantage of another bright mid December day by setting out to further explore the western suburbs of Sheffield – this time to Nether Edge, which has been developed on the eastward sloping land to the immediate east of the escarpment of Greenmoor Rock known as Brincliffe Edge.
I had only been to Nether Edge a couple of times, once to attend an indoor meeting with the Sheffield U3A Geology Group at the bowling club and then briefly visiting St. Andrew’s Methodist Church and Kenwood House, while taking a break from St. Helen’s church during the September 2018 Heritage Open Days festival.
As with the Broomhill and Broomhall Conservation Areas, Nether Edge is dominated by large spacious villas and tree lined streets and, based on Boston in the USA, this area is an early example of town planning. During the expansion of the western suburbs from c1850 onwards, it was considered highly desirable by wealthy businessmen and it is still an affluent part of the city.
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| A map of the Nether Edge Conservation Area |
Alighting from the No. 56 bus at the top of Montgomery Road, which runs up the dip slope of the Grenoside Sandstone I turned onto Machon Bank Road and headed up the hill along its strike, before continuing up the dip slope of another unnamed sandstone along Barkers Road.
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| Listed Buildings in Nether Edge, Sharrow and Broomhall |
As usual, I had with a list of buildings that did not yet have a photograph on the British Listed Buildings website and my first planned stop was at The Edge, a late C18 brick built house on Ladysmith Avenue that is surrounded by Edwardian stone terraced houses.
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| A cleaned terraced house on Ladysmith Avenue |
Stopping quickly to photograph a house that had been recently cleaned, the sandstone used for the walling is uniformly buff in colour and has a block size that I had often seen in the Crawshaw Sandstone, where used for the Sheffield Board Schools.
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| The gable wall to an old coach house |
Turning right into Edgebrook Road, I carried on along the road until I reached the coursed rubble gable wall of an old double arched coach house, which is built out of a very moderately fine grained, generally thin bedded sandstone with larger angular blocks mixed in with them.
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| Walling at the old coach house |
It has extreme pale grey to deep orange/brown colouration, with the latter dominating the elevation. The quarrying of the Greenmoor Rock, known in Sheffield as the Brincliffe Edge Rock, was a major industry less than 1 km away as the crow flies and it is therefore very likely that the stone came from one of these quarries.
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| No. 4 Edgebrook Road |
A little further up the road is No. 4 Edgebrook Road (1859), which is set at right angles to the road and has had a new lean to extension added to its south elevation at a later date. The original house is constructed using thinly bedded sandstone, which has similar colours to that just seen in the coach house but is better sorted, together with rock-faced band courses that are made of the same massive sandstone as the dressings.
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| No. 4 Edgebrook Road |
The building is quite dirty, with the dressings being very blackened in places, but it is still possible to see the orange iron staining in the sandstone of the general walling. I only took a few general photos while passing by, without examining the stonework, but I was quite struck by this building.
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| The gable end of No. 4 Edgebrook Road |
On its north elevation, a section of the wall is somehow free of grime and the weathered stonework quite spectacularly shows extreme grey and orange colour variations in the rock, which reflect the oxidation state of the iron bearing minerals within the sandstone.
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| A detail of the north elevation of No. 4 |
The terraced houses on the opposite side of the road are also built with a more massive sandstone that has a fair proportion of distinctly orange/brown blocks. I am more familiar with the general physical characteristics of the Greenmoor Rock where used for its top quality paving and monumental stone than for general building use but, unless any other quarries supplied Grenoside Sandstone for example, it is likely that the stone comes from the Brincliffe Edge quarries.
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| Terraced houses on Edgebrook Road |
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