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| An outcrop of sandstone on Normanton Hill |
Week 15 of the COVID-19 Pandemic restrictions in 2020 coincided with the summer solstice on Saturday 20th June and, although I didn’t plan it this way, my next walk to the Shire Brook Valley Nature Reserve – after my exploration of the Advanced Manufacturing Park - ended up being my longest of the year.
There is no direct bus route from Treeton to Woodhouse, which is on the edge of the nature reserve and, with restricted bus services still operating, I had to plan my day out carefully and so firstly caught the No.73 bus to the junction of Richmond Road and Normanton Hill.
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| A view from the top of Normanton Hill |
Starting at the Carboniferous limestone retaining wall at the top of Normanton Hill, which the 1855 map and LIDAR seem to indicate it occupies part of an old sandstone quarry here, the road directly follows the line of the Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation sandstone all the way down to Normanton Spring – as clearly seen on the Geology of Britain Map Viewer.
Vegetation largely obscures the views on either side of the road, but an escarpment to the left and a valley down to the right are quite obvious, with the latter clearly marked by the dip in the road, as seen from the junction with Hollybank Road.
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| A view from the top of Hollybank Road |
From here, a ridge of Parkgate Rock can also be seen on the skyline beyond Mansfield Road, with an escarpment facing the north-west and the apparent dip of this regionally important stratigraphic member to the south-east.
On the opposite side road of Normanton Hill at Hunter’s Lane, there is access to Richmond Park from which a photo taken with a zoom lens reveals the geology to the east, which as at Kiveton Park highlights the value of using high resolution photographs to identify recognisable landmarks.
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| A view from Richmond Park to Laughton-en-le-Morthen |
In the foreground is the escarpment of Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation sandstone at Stradbroke Road, the ridge of Mexborough Rock at Ulley – with the Penny Hill Wind Farm behind it - and All Saints church in Laughton-en-le-Morthen sitting on an outlier of the Permian Cadeby Formation in the distance.
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| Walling stone on Hunter's Lane |
A handful of cottages and the boundary walls on Hunter’s Lane are presumably built with stone from one of the old quarries nearby and, looking closely, this is seen to be yellowish sandstone and grey siltstone that is deeply weathered in places.
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| Walling stone on Hunter's Lane |
Back on Normanton Hill, the older boundary walls that run down from Richmond Road are built out of similar yellow sandstone, where differential weathering highlights its laminated nature, which indicates that it was formed as a crevasse splay and not within a river channel.
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| Detail of a boundary wall on Normanton Hill |
Continuing down the hill for several hundred metres, there was nothing to see but tall hedgerows until I was about to arrive at Normanton Spring. Here, hidden behind scrub and trees, there are various small outcrops of differentially weathered laminated sandstone, which is similar to that seen in the boundary walls further up Normanton Hill.
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| An outcrop of laminated sandstone on Normanton Hill |
With a couple of exceptions, all of the boundary walling that I had seen while walking down from Richmond Road was poor quality rubble stone, which was undoubtedly quarried from the escarpment here. At the bottom of Normanton Hill, on either side of the road, there are small sections of wall that are built with well squared and coursed pitch-faced massive sandstone and have been quarried elsewhere.
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| Walling to the old railway bridge on Normanton Hill |
These seem very much out of place and there is nothing here to suggest why a costly wall like this would have been built, however, looking at old Ordnance Survey maps, these form part of the bridge that crossed the railway line to the old Birley Collieries, of which very little remains are left.
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| A detail of the railway bridge wall on Normanton Hill |
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