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| A commemorative plaque at Hillsborough Library |
Having spent less than 25 minutes surveying the stonework at Hillsborough Board School, I entered Hillsborough Park at the Parkside Road entrance and continued along the main path, with no real objective but to walk down to Hillsborough by the most scenic route.
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| A view of the escarpment of Greenmoor Rock |
Looking across the park, where the low lying grassed area passes into the alluvium laid down by the River Don, I could see a large expanse of exposed rock in the escarpment that rises sharply to the east of the river.
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| An exposure of Greenmoor Rock |
I assumed that this was the Greenmoor Rock, a geological formation that I know very well from surveys of geological sites between Sheffield and Green Moor undertaken over the years. I made a mental note to investigate it, along with another site at Wadsley Bridge, some time in the future.
Approaching the late C18 Hillsborough Hall Public Library, which is Grade II Listed, I was very interested to see that its separately listed coach house and stable were being restored by Age UK Sheffield - for a community cafe and dementia centre.
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| The coachhouse and stable to Hillsborough Hall |
I can’t remember having seen this before, but I could only see it from the site perimeter fence and, with the scaffold obscuring the masonry, I didn’t get a chance to see its condition and just carried on round to Hillsborough Library.
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| Hillsborough Hall Public Library |
Although the sun had now come out, I stopped only long enough to take a couple of general photos for the British Listed Buildings website and details of the well defined cross-bedding and graded beds in the sandstone and the commemorative plaques.
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| A commemorative plaque at Hillsborough Library |
I didn’t spend any time examining the sandstone closely but, looking at my photographs, I can tell that it is medium/coarse grained and contains a significant amount of iron, but it is moderately uniform in colour and doesn’t possess obvious iron banding or Liesegang rings.
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| Cross-bedding at Hillsborough Library |
In the late C18, stone would have brought from a nearby source and with the Bole Hill quarries less than 2 km away as the crow flies, it is quite possible that Hillsborough Hall is built in stone from one of the old quarries that were once found here; however, the nearby quarries in Grenoside also produced considerable quanities of Grenoside Sandstone for building stone.
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| An outcrop of Crawshaw Sandstone at Bolehills in Crookes |
Looking at the pattern of cross-bedding in the stone, it made me immediately think of the spectacular example at Bolehills in Crookes, where the Crawshaw Sandstone was once quarried. The whole area has been landscaped, following the closure of the quarries, and the remnants of the old quarry faces here are the only exposure of this rock formation that I know.
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| A detail of the cross-bedding in the Crawshaw Sandstone at Bolehills |
The sample that I obtained is from a bed that has a moderately planar nature, with no obvious cross bedding and the body of the sandstone has discernable iron staining and is medium to medium/coarse grained.
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| My specimen of the Crawshaw Sandstone |
With such a vast area of Walkley Bank and Bole Hill being once quarried, the grain size and other sedimentary characteristics would have varied from quarry to quarry and, without supporting documentary evidence – or reference buildings to compare with - it is impossible to determine its exact provenance.
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| A view from Hillsborough Park towards Walkley Bank |
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