Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park

 

An information board at Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park

Towards the end of February 2024, prompted by a committee member who had read my Language of Stone Blog post about my walk from Burngreave to Owlerton, I was contacted on Facebook by the Chair of the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery, to ask if I could help to produce a geological guide for Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park. 

 

The location of Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park

 

Having been involved with projects at Bolsterstone, the Sheffield General Cemetery and Moorgate Cemetery in Rotherham, as well as photographing very many Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, I was very interested in the idea – especially since I had visited their stand at the Sheffield Heritage Fair the previous year, when I was impressed by the various projects that were being developed there. 

 

A leaflet about Wardsend Cemetery

 

On the two occasions that I had visited the cemetery, with the last time being towards the end of a walk from Birley Edge, I had been following the outcrop of the Greenmoor Rock, which at Wadsley Bridge, the Upper Don Trail and Parkwood Springs is split into two leaves and at Neepsend is predominantly argillaceous – a property that made this formation suited to brick making. 

 

The geology around Wardsend Cemetery and Parkwood Springs

 

Due to a combination of a persistent muscle strain and continuing bad weather since my trip to Pilsley and Baslow in February, which turned out to be the 4th wettest on record, March passed without going out on any trips and I finally arranged to meet with Howard and Hugh at the cemetery in the first week of April. 

 

A view of the escarpment of Greenmoor Rock from Livesey Street

 

Alighting from the Supertram at Hillsborough, I made my way along Bradfield Road to Livesey Street, where there is a view of the escarpment of the Greenmoor Rock beyond the Owlerton Stadium. Continuing along this, I was very interested to see a long stretch of rubble walling on another road that is also called Livesey Street, which is built with Carboniferous Limestone. 

 

A wall built with Carboniferous Limestone on Livesey Street

I arrived at the cemetery in plenty of time for my meeting and had a quick look at the area around to the north of the old chapel, where the Hillsborough Barracks war memorial is in the form of a simple obelisk made of a massive sandstone. 

 

The site of the chapel

During previous visits, I had walked down the path from the railway line and was surprised to see what is effectively woodland, in which I noted that the vast majority of headstones are relatively plain slabs of a type that can be seen in the oldest parts of the large Victorian cemeteries that I had encountered in Sheffield – including Burngreave, Abbey Lane and City Road. 

 

Victorian headstones

These, I have always presumed, are made from the variety of the Greenmoor Rock that is known in Sheffield as the Brincliffe Edge Rock, which was famed for its memorial quality stone supplied by several quarries located on the escarpment that runs from Brincliffe Edge down to Brocco Bank. 

 

The Westnedge family memorial

As with most cemeteries that I have visited, I had expected to see a various large granite memorials, but the Westnedge family memorial (1879), in the form of an obelisk with a hipped slab on a sandstone  plinth at the base, is the only one that I saw. 

 

A hipped tomb slab at the Westnedge memorial

Looking closely at the hipped slab, I recognised the pale grey granite slab as being Kemnay granite, which was formed during the Caledonian orogeny approximately 475 million years ago (mya) in the Ordovician period. It is classified as a biotite-muscovite granite, with the alignment of the black biotite giving it a foliated appearance, due to subsequent regional metamorphism.

 

A detail of the Kemnay granite on the hipped slab

This is one of the granites that I first encountered, when learning stone identification and matching skills in the building restoration industry. Described in the late Dr. Eric Robinson’s London Illustrated Geological Walks as having an oatmeal texture, it was one of many granites quarried in Aberdeen and along with the Tom’s Forest Grey variety was included in the Triton Stone Library – which will soon reappear in a new form at the Redmires building at Sheffield Hallam University. 

 

A detail of the grey granite used for the obelisk

The stepped plinth is made of a very similar granite, which has a similar mineralogy except that the biotite is slightly more abundant but is not foliated. The general colour has made me think that this could be Rubislaw granite (470 mya) which was also quarried in Aberdeen, but this typically has a greater ferromagnesian mineral content, which typically makes it much darker. 

 

Red granite on the Westnedge memorial

 

I think that the red granite is Ross of Mull granite from the Silurian period (425 mya), which has dark red potassium feldspars that appear slightly fractured. A distinctive characteristic of this granite is not only the colour of the feldspar but it also contains small amounts of greenish hornblende, which I can just discern when enlarging my photographs. 

 

A detail of the Ross of Mull granite

 

Following the path towards the railway for a short distance, I noted a couple of kerbed headstones from the late inter-war period that I think are made of the dark pink Silurian Peterhead granite (425 mya) and a grey granite from the Permian Cornubian Batholith (280-275 mya), which outcrops as the tors of Devon and Cornwall. 

 

A kerbed headstone made of Peterhead granite

 

When Howard and Hugh turned up, we had a talk about the various projects that were being planned and, in particular, I was interested to note that it was intended to incorporate these into plans for the regeneration of Parkwood Springs, which has been awarded £19m Levelling Up funding. I had highlighted the geological importance of Parkwood Springs to various members of the Friends of Parkwood Springs in recent years at the Sheffield Heritage Fair and this therefore presented a good opportunity to take this forward. 

 

A kerbed headstone made with granite from the Cornubian Batholith

 

I had hoped to take a much better look at the rest of the cemetery but Hugh, who had done most of the work on the headstones, had to get to another appointment. Making arrangements to meet again during the meeting of the Friends of Wardsend Cemetery on the coming Saturday, I returned to Sheffield and whilst doing some shopping at LIDL, I stopped to photograph the old paving stones on Mulberry Street, which I think are an example of the use of the Rough Rock for paving, which is the first that I have seen in the city centre.

 

Rough Rock paving on Mulberry Street