 |
Colour variations in the limestone in a cottage on Station Road
|
 |
Palterton and Scarcliffe
|
Having a particular interest in building stones, at the junction with the Rotherham to Mansfield road, I stopped to photograph the Horse and Groom public house and a house with converted agricultural buildings attached, both of which are shown on the 1884 Ordnance Survey map as being isolated from the rest of the village.
 |
The Horse and Groom public house
|
Looking at a distance, the masonry of the Horse and Groom appeared very similar to the cream coloured limestone that I encountered in the majority of historic buildings in Palterton, although I could see some isolated pink and yellow tinged blocks.
 |
Former agricultural buildings on Main Street
|
The lower section of the group of agricultural buildings, however, are built in limestone that is distinctly yellow, which is best seen on the Main Street elevation. Although a yellow variation is very often seen when the Cadeby Formation is underlain by the Yellow Sands Formation, this is not found in the area.
 |
A terrace of late C19 houses on Main Street
|
Crossing Mansfield Road, I continued down Main Street for a couple of hundred metres until I reached a terrace of six late C19 houses, which have been built opposite Budget Lane. In passing, I could see that both the walling of the houses and the boundary walls are built out of cream coloured limestone, with no colour variation being obvious.
 |
Manor Farmhouse
|
A little further down Main Street, the early C19 Manor Farmhouse provides a further example of yellow and pink limestone blocks sporadically appearing amongst cream coloured limestone. This colour variation is most obvious where the greyish patina has weathered away and a similar pattern is also seen in the various farm buildings associated with it.
 |
An agricultural building at Manor Farm
|
Interestingly, both this and the nearby early C19 Hall Farmhouse are described in their Historic England listing entries as being built in coursed square sandstone, with sandstone dressings, which shows how variations in the Cadeby Formation can be misidentified by an untrained eye.
 |
Hall Farmhouse
|
Although I didn’t closely examine any of the masonry in the buildings that I saw, however, the British Geological Survey memoir for the district describes the limestone at the former Scarcliffe Station, 700 metres south-southeast, as being pink over a considerable thickness and red and sandy in places and stone of this description appears in the boundary wall to Hall Farm.
 |
Red sandy limestone in the boundary wall of Hall Farm
|
On the opposite side of the road to the red limestone wall at Hall Farm, what I presume to be the oldest part of the cottage is built with very large blocks of a very yellow sandstone, with much of the thinner bedded masonry surrounding it also being yellow.
 |
Large blocks of yellow limestone
|
Carrying on past St. Leonard’s church, which had not yet opened for its Heritage Open Days, I went to have a quick look at the cluster of historic buildings along Station Road, which appear on the 1884 Ordnance Survey map before the railway was built.
 |
A house on Station Road
|
Whereas the yellow and pink limestone had constituted only a minor proportion of the various buildings that I had so far seen in Scarcliffe, here it is now a major component of the masonry and in places is as common as the typical cream coloured limestone.
 |
Vernacular architecture with variations in the colour of the limestone
|
Except for the church, all the historic buildings in Scarcliffe are simple houses and agricultural buildings and it is therefore very probable that a local quarry supplied the stone. Two small quarries are recorded less than a kilometre to the south of the village on the 1884 map; however, without documentary evidence, the provenance of the various stones will probably never be known.
 |
Yellow limestone in an outhouse
|
No comments:
Post a Comment