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| A statue of St. George and the Dragon |
On my walk along Richmond Road from Normanton Hill to the old centre of Handsworth, I had seen a few different Coal Measures sandstones in mainly Victorian terraced houses and various boundary walls.
The most common of these has a very distinctive ‘ginger nut’ hue to the stonework, which masks the generally grey colour of the body of the stone and, with this being used in so many historic buildings in Handsworth, I have always assumed that its source must have been the Handsworth Quarries to the north of the old village.
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| St. Joseph's church |
The Victorian terraced houses along St. Joseph’s Road are built of the same variety of sandstone and I was therefore quite surprised to see that the churchyard wall of St. Joseph’s Catholic church and the old school next to it are built in Rotherham Red sandstone.
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| A gatepost and section of boundary wall |
Over the years, I have seen innumerable historic buildings and boundary walls that have been built out of this locally distinctive variety of Mexborough Rock. It can range in colour from deep red, various shades of mauve to red/yellow mottled varieties, which are not easy to describe even with a Munsell colour chart.
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| The west front of St. Joseph's church |
Entering the churchyard, I immediately noticed that the west end of the church itself is built in another mottled red/yellow sandstone, with a pitched face finish, and that the dressings are constructed in what looks like a similar sandstone.
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| The west door |
The western bay and south porch were added from 1956 to 1957 by Hadfield, Cawkwell & Davidson to the original church built in 1881 by the Sheffield architects M.E Hadfield & Son – who built St. Marie’s cathedral and other catholic churches in the region. I didn’t closely examine this with a hand lens, but my first impression was that this could be one of the mottled Triassic sandstones that would have easy enough to transport to Sheffield in the 1950’s.
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| The south elevation of St. Joseph's church |
Their client Henry Fitzalan-Howard, the 15th Duke of Norfolk was a great benefactor of the Roman Catholic Church in Sheffield and when the church, the adjoining presbytery and the school were commissioned, the sandstone used was extracted from his Bole Hill quarries in Treeton – according to the Taking Stock website.
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| The west elevation of the presbytery |
The Rotherham Red sandstone used for the boundary wall and the general walling in the presbytery are obviously very different to the quoins and dressings used in the latter and for the ashlar in the south wall of the nave to the church.
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| Masonry used in the extension (L) and original nave (R) |
The best pale mauve coloured Rotherham Red sandstone has quite a uniform colour, but they still contain reddened ironstone pellets, mainly altered to haematite, which are quite characteristic of this rock and detract from its quality as a building stone.
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| A detail of the dragon |
Although the church and presbytery are Grade II Listed, they are generally quite austere but there is a fine carving of St. George and the Dragon in Permian dolomitic limestone, set in an ornate niche on a corner of the projecting bay to the presbytery.
On this occasion, I didn’t investigate the north and east elevations of the church and presbytery but other points of interest here are the Grade II Listed water pump, with a large stone trough and a very modern sculpture of the Virgin Mary that looked extremely uniform in colour and very new.
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| A statue of the Virgin Mary |
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