Mexborough Rock in the old quarry in Rock Pottery Yard |
Continuing my walk down Bank Street in Mexborough, the Conservation Area strangely contains no listed buildings and stone buildings aren’t that common. One that still exists is the old Royal Electric Theatre, built in 1911 and now a Chinese restaurant, but its rare Baroque style cartouche is now painted in gaudy colours.
A short distance further down the road, I passed Rock Pottery Yard, where I noticed a substantial quarry face, with massive Mexborough Rock being overlain by similar thinner beds to those seen a little further to the east behind Dazzle Hair Design.
I didn’t go and investigate further and just took a few photos with my zoom lens to record its essential features, which includes a gentle apparent dip of the strata to the east; however, although I hadn’t thought of the area around Mexborough as a field trip for the Sheffield U3A Geology Group, I will make the effort to take a closer look when I next visit.
Walking further down Bank Street, I encountered several interesting historic buildings in the Conservation Area that use brick, render and faience rather than the local sandstone as the principal building material.
The former Primitive Methodist Chapel, which is now used for selling spare parts for cars, is built with a sandstone that I don’t think is quarried locally. The ashlar masonry comprises medium grained, cross bedded sandstone that is uniformly light brown in colour and doesn’t have iron nodules or obvious Liesegang rings and other iron staining.
Mexborough Congregational Church |
The overall impression of Mexborough is that there are far too many empty spaces, where other historic buildings of lesser architectural merit have been demolished without thought of what might replace it. Also, like many similar small towns in South Yorkshire that largely relied on coal mining and associated industries to sustain the economy, it has seen much better days.
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