The Quarry on Middlewood Road

 

A sample from The Quarry

When visiting Loxley Edge and Wadsley Common, where I was shown around by a resident Jan, we had a quick discussion about the stone used to build her house, which did not look like that used for the houses in Wadsley, when it was suggested that it may have come from the demolition of buildings at the nearby Middlewood psychiatric hospital. 

 

An old quarry marked on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map

For my next walk, after my exploration of the Towers, Sandygate Road, Stumperlowe and Fulwood Road, I decided to explore the area around Wadsley Park Village, a housing development that has been built on the site of the asylum grounds – starting at an area of land named as The Quarry on Google Maps, which is marked as a sandstone quarry on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map. 

 

The 1906 Ordnance Survey and LIDAR maps

On the 1906 edition, this is marked as the site of the Klondyke Brickworks, which closed in 1936 after a few changes of ownership but has surprisingly remained undeveloped. The LIDAR map shows a substantial quarry face and, having taken the Supertram from Sheffield city centre to Middlewood Park and Ride, I went to investigate. 

 

A view towards the old quarry face

 

Looking at the 1:50,000 British Geological Survey map, the brickworks is sited on the Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation beneath the Loxley Edge Rock, which is downthrown to the east of the Sheffield Fault. According to the geological memoir, the lower part of the Loxley Edge Rock largely comprises shale and mudstone, which was exploited to make the bricks here. 

 

The geology around Middlewood

Moving closer to the exposed quarry face, I could only see sections of alternating beds of fine grained sandstone, siltstone and mudstone, which look nothing like the coarse grained Loxley Edge Rock that I had seen during my previous investigations of Sheffield’s geology. 

 

A view of the old quarry face

Making my way through the undergrowth, which so often obscures old quarry faces, I zoomed in with my Canon G7X Mark II Powershot camera to a section where ripple marks can be clearly seen in the finer grained beds. 

 

A detail of the old quarry face

 

Continuing along the quarry face, I noted further sections where thin flaggy beds in the generally cross-bedded sequence pass downwards into siltstone and much finer grained sediments, which are clearly seen from their differential weathering.

 

Siltstone and mudstone exposed in the old quarry face

I couldn’t safely get to the quarry face to retrieve a sample with my Estwing hammer, but I was able to collect a sample of very fine grained, cross-laminated brown sandstone, which contains no mica but has specks of carbonaceous material on the bedding plane.

 

A sample from The Quarry