St. Mary's Church in Wheatley

 

The west end of St. Mary's church

The village of Armthorpe is mainly associated with Markham Main Colliery and, although mentioned in Domesday Book and I saw a couple of buildings that are marked on the 1854 Ordnance Survey map, the Church of St. Leonard and St. Mary is its only listed building. 

 

Our Lady of Sorrows and Saint Francis Roman Catholic church

 

Having had a look at is exterior and interior and collecting a few glaciofluvial pebbles from the churchyard, I then took a few photos of Our Lady of Sorrows and Saint Francis Roman Catholic church (1959), where serpentinite has been used for the door surround, before catching the No. 382 bus to Wheatley. 

 

Views of St. Mary's church

A British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge showed just a couple of buildings in the vicinity, St. Mary’s church (1885) and Strawberry Lock; however, the latter didn’t appear to be easily accessible and I therefore only visited the church, which was designed by Lord Grimthorpe. 

 

A view of the west front

It had been originally been my intention just to take a few record photos, but I was quite curious about the stones used to build the church. Although an overcast day, the walling stone appeared to have quite a noticeable green/grey colour, which I had noticed in St. Bartholomew’s church in Old Whittington the week before. 

 

A detail of walling stone and quoins

 

At St. Bartholomew’s church, the stone used was obtained from a Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation sandstone, the Wingfield Flags, which obtains its colour from the presence of the mineral chlorite, like its northerly equivalent - the Greenmoor Rock.

 

A window in the south aisle

 

The well established railway network enabled the specification of a wide variety of building stones, as an alternative to the local dolomitic limestone from the Cadeby Formation. Ancaster freestone, with its distinctive ripple marks, has been used for the quoins, window surrounds, other dressings and for headstops to the west door. 

 

A headstop

The headstops have in part accumulated a thick black crust, formed by industrial atmospheric pollution and is associated with the formation of calcium sulphate, a soluble salt which can cause great damage when it is absorbed into the pores and then recrystallises. 

 

A headstop

Lord Grimthorpe, then only Sir Edward Beckett Denison, also designed the Church of St. James (1858) in conjunction with Sir George Gilbert Scott, which is built entirely in Ancaster limestone. The headstops here, which are also partially covered with a black crust, are very similar in style and look like they have been carved by the same sculptor, despite a difference of 27 years in age. 

 

A capping stone on a buttress

The capping stones to the buttresses on the west end are made of a cross-bedded, coarse grained and shelly limestone, which I thought is probably Ancaster weatherbed, which is typically 'blue hearted' but here has differentially weathered to reveal a cream colour. 

 

Capping stones on a buttress

 

Back in 1996, I worked for a few months at the Gregory’s Quarry in Mansfield, sawing White Mansfield  dolomitic sandstone, Chilmark calcareous sandstone, Ancaster hard white limestone and Ancaster weatherbed. The latter is very dense and, when feeling its resistance to the saw blade, I understood why this generally very durable variety of Ancaster stone has been used for weathering courses. 

 

Over the years, I have seen very many examples of differentially weathered Ancaster freestone that reveals its ‘streaky bacon’ texture, but I was very surprised to see a section of a buttress where the conversion of calcium carbonate into calcium sulphate seems to be in progress - a process that results in a significant increase in volume. 

 

Red sandstone used for the plinth course and quoins

 

The plinth course and the quoins to the lower sections of the buttresses are made with a dull red sandstone that is both massive and very coarse grained with small pebbles and medium grained plane bedded varieties. 

 

Another view of red sandstone used for the plinth course and quoins

I have encountered reddened medium grained gritstone from the Corbar Grit/Ashover Grit at Birchover and Cromford along the Derwent Valley, but I don’t recall ever seeing small pebbles in these. A Google search mentions that reddened gritstone is found at Spofforth and Follifoot in North Yorkshire, both of which were connected to the railway network when the church was built. 

 

A detail of the quoins used in a buttress

 

One section of the plinth course is badly weathered and very friable and I managed to obtain a small piece of this, which subsequently partially disintegrated. Immediately below the blackened surface, the sandstone is quite reddened, but the body of the stone is a dull mauve colour. 

 

A heavily weathered stone in the plinth course

Comparing the piece from the plinth course with a specimen of the Rotherham Red variety of the Mexborough Rock, which comprises a drill core from my house when a new boiler was installed, the colours are very similar. Examining them both with the naked eye and a hand lens, although the former is poorly cemented, they are both medium grained and the mineralogy also appears to be similar - although petrographic analysis would be needed to confirm this.

 

Comparing the sample from St. Mary's church with my Wentworth scale

  

The generally very coarse texture rules out the use of Rotherham Red sandstone, as this is fine to medium grained and in my experience doesn’t contain pebbles. Although the geological memoir mentions a quarry at Spofforth and that the Plumpton grits did produce building stone, referring to Spofforth castle, the Building Stones Database for England map explorer doesn’t show quarries at either Spofforth or Follifoot. 

 

Sandstone from St. Mary's church (top) and my house (bottom)

At some point, the deterioration of the stone to the plinth course will require it to be restored, using a red sandstone that matches the original as closely as possible. As seen in the Triton Stone Library, now in the Redmires Building at Sheffield Hallam University, the vast majority of red sandstones quarried today are from the Permian and Triassic periods, with these being much brighter in colour and obtaining a good match is therefore not easy.

 

The Triton Stone Library in the Redmires Building

 

Graveyard Geology in Armthorpe

 

Volcanic green slate used for the memorial to Maria and Albert Dobson

I spent less than an hour looking at the exterior and interior of the Church of St. Leonard and Mary in Armthorpe, including a discussion of the creation of a ‘friends group’ with Captain Andrew Payne, before going to search for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstones in the churchyard.

 

CWGC headstones in the churchyard

 

It didn’t take long for me to find these headstones and, having seen all of the regimental crests before, I just took a general photograph of them without taking a close look at the Portland stone that has been used to make them.

 

CWGC headstones made of Portland stone

 

The headstone of Lance Serjeant Sydney Brunt of the Coldstream Guards is the only headstone that is made of Botticino marble, as a replacement of the original headstone, but there is no record of the stone that was first used.

 

The headstone of Lance Serjeant Sydney brunt

I then had a wander around the churchyard to see what other stones that I could find. I immediately came across the memorial to Sub-Lieutenant Ian Macallister of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a privately commissioned headstone in the form of a Celtic cross.

 

The memorial of Sub-Lieutenant Ian Macallister

Although the CWGC monitor the condition of these private memorials, they do not maintain them and there is no record of the headstone on their website. Although the roughly hewn finish and accumulated dirt makes it harder to identify than a polished stone, it looks to me like a granite from the Cornubian Batholith, which underlies much of Cornwall and Devon and outcrops as distinctive tors on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor.

 

The headstone of Emily and George Foster

The headstone of Emily Foster (d.1952) and her husband George (d.1965) is made out of a quite finely grained grey granite, with which I am not familiar and I didn’t take any close up photos with my macro camera setting to help me identify the mineralogy.

 

The headstone of Annie and William Scarsbrook

 

Italian white Carrara marble is used for the kerbed headstone of Annie (d.1953) and William (d.1979) Scarsbrook, with some of the lead lettering having been lost due to the effects of weathering in the British climate – as I had seen two days before at Handsworth New Cemetery.

 

The kerbed headstone of Mary and Fred Belton

Another kerbed headstone, this time commemorating Mary (d.1947) and Fred (d.1963) Belton, is made of a red granite that I think is Scottish Peterhead granite from the Aberdeenshire coast, which I have seen many times in later Victorian banks and memorials.

 

The headstone of Harry Bond

 

The headstone of Harry Bond (d.1942) is made with an igneous rock from Norway, which is known in the stone trade as Emerald Pearl and by geologists as larvikite - a variety of monzonite that is essentially composed of the end-member potassium, sodium and calcium feldspars.

 

The headstone of members of the Higham family

  

Along with Blue Pearl, which is seen in the headstone that commemorates various members of the Higham family, larvikite is easily recognised by the iridescence described as the Schiller effect - a characteristic that made this stone very popular with late Victorian and Edwardian architects, when designing banks and other commercial buildings. 

An Earth Learning Idea resource by Peter Kennett

 

This very attractive stone appears in many booklets and online guides, which highlight the stones used in buildings and memorials as a way to introduce students at all levels to ‘urban geology’ – as highlighted by Peter Kennett, Eric Robinson and others.

 

The headstone of Maria and Albert Dobson

Moving on to the kerbed headstone of Maria Dobson (d.1941) and her husband Albert (d.1945), I was very interested to see that this is made of volcanic green slate from the Borrowdale Volcanic Group in Cumbria – a succession of andesitic lava, ignimbrites and tuffs that I mapped as a geology undergraduate at Nottingham University.

 

Glaciofluvial pebbles

When looking closely at stone used for some of the headstones, I noticed a few glaciofluvial pebbles on the ground beside them and, when continuing my wander around the headstones, discovered that these are found everywhere in the churchyard.

 

Glaciofluvial pebbles

I collected several pebbles, which included several examples of white vein quartz and various quartzites, with some Carboniferous sandstone in the form of ventifacts, which have flattened faces that are the result of the sandblasting action of wind blown sand.

 

Glaciofluvial pebbles collected from the churchyard

Looking at the geological map of the area, the churchyard is sited on a deposit of Quaternary glaciofluvial sand and gravel of Pre-Ipswichian age that overlies the Triassic red sandstone of the Chester Formation, which in Doncaster contains no pebble beds. The presence of ‘Bunter quartzite’ pebbles indicates that these were derived from the Midlands by north-west flowing meltwater during the Wolstonian glaciation.

 

The geological map of the area around Armthorpe

The last headstone that I photographed commemorates Irene (d.2019) and John (d. 2022) Dodson, which is made of a red granite that looks like it might be Balmoral red granite from Finland, but granites used for modern headstones are obtained from all over the world, with India and China being the leading suppliers.

 

The headstone of Irene and John Dobson

 

Leaving the churchyard by the lychgate, I stopped to photograph the ‘black granite’ war memorial that has been set into the wall and which mainly records victims of WW1 and WW2, but includes servicemen who died in the Khyber Pass and in Northern Ireland.

 

The war memorial in the lychgate

St. Mary's Church in Armthorpe - Part 2

 

Decoration to the south impost of the chancel arch

Entering the Church of St. Leonard and St. Mary in Armthorpe by the south door, having briefly looked at its exterior, I immediately noted that the walls are plastered and that the exposed stonework is confined to the window dressings, the chancel arch and the arcade.

 

A view of the arcade and nave

 

Towards the east end of the nave, Pevsner describes an unmoulded pointed arch across the nave as being an unusual feature and that it supported an earlier bell turret. He further states that it is of uncertain date, although he considers that it could be early C13. 

 

The arch that supported an earlier bell turret

The north aisle, along with the arcade, was added during the 1885 restoration and, with it being partly occupied by attendees of the Wednesday crafting session, I didn’t spend any time inspecting the stone used for the window dressings. 

 

A view east along the north aisle

 

Although I again didn’t look closely at the stone, the arcade appears to be built with a uniformly buff coloured medium grained gritstone. this is quite unusual, as dolomitic limestone from local quarries in the Cadeby Formation is typically used for the mediaeval churches in Doncaster and for the Victorian Doncaster Minster and Christ Church. 

 

The arcade

I am not familiar with other Victorian churches in Doncaster and what stones may have been used in them but, with the railway network in the north of England having been well established by the time the north aisle was added, it is probable that the sandstone used is from West Yorkshire – with Huddersfield stone from the Rough Rock and Bolton Woods sandstone from the Elland Flags being popular materials. 

 

A slit window in the south wall of the nave

The walls of Norman churches tend to be very thick and, on the south side of the nave, this can be seen in the deep splays to the slit windows, which were designed to provide the maximum amount of light. The dolomitic limestone used for the window surrounds, however, is very dirty and its properties could not be seen. 

 

Windows in the south wall of the nave

 

Moving along the nave to the chancel arch, which is described by Historic England as dating to the C11, with a “plain round arch with chamfered imposts, that on south carved with crosses and zig-zag motif”, but Pevsner failed to note this. 

 

Views of the chancel arch

In respect of the decoration on the impost, the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture of Britain and Ireland adds “Patterns laid out within a grid are common, but a prominent raised grid like this is rare” and suggests that the mason either did not know what decoration would be required or that he wasn’t supervised. 

 

The decorated south impost in the chancel arch

 

The lighting in the chancel was very poor and I didn’t manage to get a good look of the details, but I did notice that a red sandstone has been used for the flooring, in conjunction with dolomitic limestone. Although the underlying bedrock is red sandstone of the Triassic Chester Formation, this is not suitable for building or paving and I assume that it is Red Mansfield stone, which was very often used by Victorian architects. 

 

Red sandstone sandstone used for the chancel floor

 

After taking a few more general record photos of the interior, including the stained glass, I then went to have a look around the churchyard, where seven Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones are located. 

 

A view west along the nave

 

St. Mary's Church in Armthorpe - Part 1

A view from the south-west

Since commencing my investigation of the 70 mediaeval churches in South Yorkshire, at St. Helen’s church in Treeton back in February 2016, by April 2025 I had managed to visit 58 of these, as well as 72 others in the surrounding counties and further afield. 

 

A view from Doncaster Road

 

Following on from an afternoon spent in nearby Handsworth, I took advantage of a regular Wednesday morning crafting session to visit the Church of St. Leonard and St. Mary in Armthorpe, dated by Historic England (HE) as “C11, C12 and C15 restored and extended 1885 for patron Lord Auckland of Edenthorpe”. 

 

A view from the south-east

 

Entering the churchyard through the lychgate, I noted the north aisle, east windows, porch, weatherboarded bell turret and the rendered exterior, which are all part of the 1885 restoration and presumably account for the church only having Grade II listed status. 

 

A detail of the limestone used for quoins to the nave

 

After having a very quick look at the irregularly shaped quoins on the south-east corner of the nave, which are made of dolomitic limestone from the Upper Permian Cadeby Formation, I walked quickly around the exterior in an anti-clockwise direction to take a few general record photos. 

 

The east end

 

Passing the vestry (1976), which further detracts from the mediaeval origins of the church, I didn’t examine the limestone used for the C19 window dressings, and assumed that it was a further use of dolomitic limestone, but the honey coloured patina that has developed on the window dressings of the north aisle is more typical of Jurassic oolitic limestones. 

 

The north elevation

I have encountered Ancaster limestone many times, where used in the late Victorian restoration of mediaeval churches built with dolomitic limestone from the Cadeby Formation, even though the latter was still readily available and it is possible that it has been used here. 

 

The west window of the nave

 

Moving round to the west end of the nave, the quoins and dressings look like they have been restored with the same limestone used for the C19 work, but it does not have a honey coloured patina. Usually, where Ancaster stone has been used, its distinctive ripple marks, sometimes referred to as ‘streaky bacon’ texture, are clearly seen, but my photo does not show these. 

 

A restored C12 slit window

 

Continuing to the south elevation of the nave, a restored round headed slit window provides evidence of the antiquity of the church and to the right of the porch, the HE description refers to a C15, cusped, square-headed 3-light window flanked by C12 round-headed slit windows., with a square-headed, ogee-traceried, single-light window to their right. 

 

Various styles of windows in the nave

HE further describe the chancel as having a “Small priest’s door with a chamfered, quoined surround and ogee-soffit lintel; on its left a square-headed, ogee-traceried, single-light window; on right a similar window of 2 lights”. Although some of the masonry and tracery have been restored at some time, plenty of the original dolomitic limestone is retained. 

 

The south elevation of the chancel

 

Returning to the C19 porch, much of the stonework on its south elevation and in the interior has been badly eroded and has had to be replaced in recent years, with efflorescent salts suggesting a problem with damp. In contrast, the limestone used for the original pilaster on the nave has not been affected to such an extent. 

 

The porch

 

Entering the porch, the round arched south door is dated by Pevsner to c.1200 and it has a very simple form, with no elaborate decoration and very plain capitals to the shafts, which have been replaced quite recently judging by the fresh appearance of the limestone.

 

The arch to the south door