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| A view up Hoober Stand |
With my exploration of St. Oswald’s church in Methley concluding my participation in the Heritage Open Days festival for 2022, I ended the weekend with a trip to the village of Wentworth, with transportation on this occasion provided by a friend that I hadn’t seen since my walk around Ulley Brook back in February.
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| A view of Hoober Stand |
Our plan was to go up Hoober Stand, one of the follies on the Wentworth Estate, which is usually opened every Sunday afternoon for 3 hours between Spring Bank Holiday and the end of September. The website for the Wentworth Estate has been hacked and, not finding any information about public visits, we turned up to discover that it was still closed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which had commenced 18 months earlier.
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| The inscription on Hoober Stand |
The folly, designed by Henry Flitcroft, was built in 1747-8 to commemorate defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, when Thomas Watson Wentworth fought on the side of King George II. At 30 metres high and set on the second highest point in Rotherham, it can be seen from miles around and the views from the top are stunning, even on a cloudy day - as was the situation when I first visited it back in 2009.
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| A view of Wentworth Woodhouse from Hoober Stand |
Although its closure put paid to our plans, we decided to go and have a quick look at the Needle’s Eye, which my friend Andy had never seen but, before setting off, I had a quick look at the adjoining quarry to take a few photographs.
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| The setting of Hoober Stand on the Abdy Rock |
I had last visited this quarry back in 1996, when undertaking surveys for the South Yorkshire RIGS (Regionally Important Geological Sites) Group, and I wanted to collect a piece of the Abdy Rock, to see how it compared with the specimen that I obtained from Rawmarsh a few months earlier.
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| The quarry in Hoober Plantation |
Very little rock is now exposed in the quarry, but I soon discovered a small section of cross-bedded flaggy sandstone, where the beds have been opened up by surface weathering processes – a feature that is quite common in the Pennine Coal Measures Group sandstones.
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| Cross-bedded flaggy sandstone |
Although I didn’t have my Estwing hammer with me, numerous pieces of sandstone were lying around and I quickly found a specimen that is buff coloured, fine grained and does not have obvious iron staining. It is quite different to my other specimen of Abdy Rock, which is grey in colour, contains flattened iron nodules, coal flecks and is associated with coal, mudstone and shale.
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| A specimen of the Abdy Rock |
I always assumed that Hoober Stand has been built with sandstone from the Hoober Plantation quarry although, since discovering the much larger Hoober Quarry when using the National Library of Scotland maps, I suspect that this may have been the source.
Documentation is needed to identify the quarry source, but the ashlar masonry at Hoober Stand has a very distinctive pattern of differentially weathered cross-bedding, which is emphasised by the contrast between the fresh and industry blackened surfaces.
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| Weathered cross-bedding at Hoober Stand |
Having obtained my specimen, I had a very quick look around the rest of the quarry and was interested to discover quite a large exposure, with massive, cross-bedded sandstone exposed below a section where the flaggy beds have been affected by surface weathering processes.
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| A large exposure of the Abdy Rock |
With Andy waiting patiently for me to finish my brief exploration of the quarry, I didn’t examine this exposure closely and just took a few general photos of its principal features; however, this enabled me to clearly see that in the lowermost beds of sandstone, where the thin beds have not yet been opened up, the fine grained beds have started to weather out.
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| A detail of the Abdy Rock |
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