An Exploration of Letwell - Part 1

 

A high quality information board in Letwell

Walking back from St. Peter’s church to the centre of Letwell, Church Lane and then Barker Hades Road are lined with post-war houses, with only a large detached house, dated 2015, being built in Permian dolomitic limestone – although the stone was not locally quarried.

 

A  modern house dating to 2015 on Church Lane

On the corner of Barker Hades Road/Ramper Road, the first vernacular building that I saw in the village is a pair of cottages, now converted to a single house, which wouldn’t look out of place in most of the villages that I have seen on the Magnesian Limestone.

 

The house on the corner of Barker Hades Road/Ramper Road

 

Not being listed, I was more interested in the war memorial on the opposite side of the road, which has a simple shaft with a Celtic cross and is made from ‘Sicilian’ marble – a former name for veined white marble that comes from Carrara in the Apuan Alps.

 

Letwell war memorial

 

Crossing back over the road, I noticed a significant number of distinctly reddened stones in the end wall of the corner building described above, which have a sandy appearance. I had seen plenty of masonry where the stones had a yellow or orange colour, where the Cadeby Formation is underlain by the Yellow Sands Formation, but I hadn't encountered anything like this in Rotherham.

 

A detail of reddened sandy dolomitic limestone

 

The British Geological Survey memoir for the East Retford district states that sandy dolomite with a high proportion of quartz occurs in several places, particularly at the top of the Sprotbrough Member of the Cadeby Formation.

 

The old Post Office

 

A little further down Barker Hades Road, the Grade II Listed old Post Office has similarly reddened masonry, as does North Farmhouse on the opposite side of the road, with the latter selectively using grey/cream coloured limestone for the principal frontage - with red sandstone only used in the end walls.

 

North Farmhouse

In this part of the Letwell, which forms the core of the Conservation Area, there is a cluster of stone built listed buildings that also have a significant amount of reddened stone in their masonry, which will have been locally quarried.

 

Various listed buildings in Letwell Conservation Area

The 1855 Ordnance Survey map marks several old quarries on the Cadeby Formation to the west and south-west of the village. The aptly named Red Quarry Plantation on Red Quarry Lane seems a likely source of the red stone in Letwell and very probably for nearby Gildingwells, where pink and red limestone is predominantly seen in its historic buildings.

 

Old quarries marked on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map

The geological memoir describes Red Quarry as being filled at the time of the 1946 survey, but it also goes on to say that many fragments of fine grained red or pink dolomite were in evidence in the vicinity. The other quarries in the area presumably produced the more typical pale grey/cream limestone, which is best seen in the Grade II Listed 7/9 Barker Hades Road.

 

7/9 Barker Hades Road