A Day Out to Eckington - Part 2

 

The headstone of Corporal R. King

When researching my day out to Eckington, principally to take photos for the British Listed Buildings website – which included the Chapel of Ease at Eckington Cemetery – I prepared a list of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstones using the Find War Dead search tool for Eckington Burial Ground.

 

A War Dead Search

 

Since encountering the headstone of Private J.W. Wornes of the Leicestershire Regiment at St. John’s church in Dronfield, back in February 2021, whenever there is a churchyard or cemetery on my travels, I have made a point of photographing these excellent examples of relief sculpture – albeit in a very random manner. 

 

The PDF grave plot map of the old part of Eckington Cemetery

Referring also to the War Graves Photographic Project website, where the non-standard private headstones are also shown, I thought that the regimental crests that I had not seen before would be easy to find, especially since Eckington Parish Council have published a guide to the cemetery; however, when seeing the PDF map, which I could not easily transfer to a printed A4 sheet that I take on my trips, I decided to just criss-cross the cemetery as usual. 

 

A view of Eckington Cemetery

 

The first headstone that I encountered was that of Private A.T. Rhodes of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, made in Portland limestone. The headstone was certified as being correct and complete on 10th April 1924 and it is therefore interesting to see how much of the limestone has weathered away over a period of very nearly 100 years. 

 

The headstone of Private A.T. Rhodes

 

The headstone of Gunner F. Smedley of the 40th Searchlight Regiment of the Sherwood Foresters is also made of Portland limestone. Certified in 1956, a lot of the detail to the regimental crest has also been lost and weathering has left the shell fragments standing proud. 

 

The headstone of Gunner. F. Smedley

 

I had already seen an example of the Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment) crest on the headstone of Private R.R. Jackson at Woodhouse Cemetery, but this is made in a French granite, where the details of the regimental crest aren’t easy to see due to the variation in the colours of the component minerals. 

 

The French granite headstone of Private R.R. Jackson

The last of the regimental crests that I wanted to find was of the South Staffordshire Regiment, which is on the headstone of Warrant Officer G.R. Porteous – again made in Portland stone that has weathered to reveal shell fragments.

  

The headstone of Warrant Officer G.R. Porteous

 

Having photographed the regimental crests on my list, I had a quick look for the other CWGC headstones and found all but one. Except for the replacement headstone of Private A. Pearson of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, which is made of Botticino marble and has been engraved with a CNC machine using Alphacam software, all of these are made with Portland stone – including the renewed headstone of Corporal R. King of the Royal Field Artillery. 

 

The headstone of Corporal A. Pearson

 

Stopping briefly to photograph a late Victorian headstone, where the surface has delaminated to reveal the grey body of the stone, I made my way down to the cemetery entrance and continued down the road towards Eckington. 

 

A delaminating Victorian headstone

 

Almost immediately, I encountered a roadside cutting where a 2 metre section of orange sandstone is exposed over a length of approximately 100 metres, which the geological map shows is an exposure of the Parkgate Rock. 

 

A roadside exposure of the Parkgate Rock

Earlier on my walk, I had already seen a very small section of orange cross-bedded sandstone in the road cutting just to the south of Windmill Greenway, which was overlain by a finer sandstone with well defined planar bedding. The slope of the A6135 road approximately follows the dip of the Parkgate Rock here and it is therefore probable that this is a lateral continuation of these beds. 

 

Views of the roadside exposure of the Parkgate Rock

Although generally massive in nature, it is cross-bedded, with variable thicknesses of individual beds and, in places, it has a closely spaced pattern of jointing that affects only certain sections of the exposure. A characteristic of the Parkgate Rock is its high iron content, which can be seen as Liesegang rings and dense concentrations of iron oxides/hydroxides on the joint planes. 

 

A detail of a concentration of iron oxides/hydroxides

I obtained a specimen from a part of the exposure that consists of quite loose and friable sandstone, which is fine grained and has a strong orange colour that is probably the result of a high limonite content. Also, it contains a couple of much darker bands 2-3 mm thick, which may be coal streaks – as described at Pitsmoor on page 83 of the geological memoir.

 

A specimen of the Parkgate Rock

  

A Day Out to Eckington - Part 1

 

A headstop at the Eckington Cemetery chapel

As a geologist, I highly value my trips with the Sheffield U3A Geology Group as, not having a car, it enables me to visit spectacular places that I would not be able to easily get to – such as Lathkill Dale and Ashover, which are both renowned field trip locations. 

 

The geology encountered whilst surveying the Sheffield Board Schools

Since the COVID-19 Pandemic lockdown however, travelling by bus from Treeton, when investigating all of the remaining Sheffield Board Schools and taking photographs for the British Listed Buildings website, I have traversed all of the principal sandstone formations between the Chatsworth Grit and the lower part of the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation – as well as some of the unnamed sandstones and intervening strata – and have got to know Sheffield’s geology and building stones quite well. 

 

The gatepiers at Mosborough Hall Hotel

For my next day out, I decided to investigate the listed buildings in Eckington, some of which I had briefly seen a couple of years earlier when visiting the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. Taking the No. 50 bus from Sheffield, my first stop was the Mosborough Hall Hotel to photograph its Grade II Listed gatepiers, which I had forgotten to do during my previous visit to Mosborough. 

 

Eckington Hall

 

Crossing over Sheffield Road, I went to have a quick look at the unlisted Eckington Hall (c1870), which was built for Joseph Wells, the owner of local collieries, but has been converted into apartments. As with the lodge and a large service building, it is built with a rock-faced uniformly yellow/brown, planar bedded sandstone, which is laid in thin courses and contrasts quite strongly with the buff coloured massive sandstone used for the quoins and dressings. 

 

The former lodge to Eckington Hall

 

Seen from a distance, the dressings look like they could be a Derbyshire gritstone, such as the Kinderscout Grit from the Stoke Hall quarry, but the walling stone is not familiar to me. The underlying bedrock is the Parkgate Rock which, along with the Silkstone Rock, has been the main source of building stone in south-east Sheffield. My sample of the only outcrop of the Parkgate Rock that I had seen, at Intake, contains several small clay ironstone nodules and older buildings around Mosborough are built in sandstone that varies in colour and has a very high iron content. 

 

The geology around Eckington Hall

According to the geological memoir, the Parkgate Rock in the Sheffield Area is united with the younger Deep Hard Rock, with the former being strongly cross-bedded and containing numerous layers of silty mudstone, with the latter being more massive; however, these formations are very variable in thickness and lateral extent and more often separated by mudstone, coal etc., which the 1:50,000 geological map doesn’t clearly show. 

 

Thinly bedded Parkgate Rock distorted by tree roots

 

Continuing with my walk down the A6135 road, just beyond Windmill Greenway there is a shallow cutting where a section of very thinly bedded and gently dipping Parkgate Rock is exposed, with the beds and the dry stone wall built upon them being distorted by tree roots in one place. 

 

A lens of sandstone with closely spaced joints

 

The lower section contains a lens of more massive sandstone, where there is a very closely spaced pattern of jointing, which I thought was quite unusual. A little further along the exposure, this more massive bed becomes very sandy and more extensively weathered to reveal a distinct orange colour. 

 

Sandy massive sandstone

Although I didn’t have my Estwing hammer with me, I managed to obtain a small sample from a 30 mm thick bed of the more durable sandstone, which is fine grained and greyish in colour, with its fine cross-bedding being highlighted by iron staining. 

 

A specimen of fine grained Parkgate Rock

My next stop was Eckington Cemetery, where the boundary wall and lodge are built out of a light brown planar bedded sandstone, with a significant amount of dense iron concentrations that is laid in relatively thin courses and which I think is probably Parkgate Rock. 

 

The boundary wall and lodge at Eckington Cemetery

The main purpose was to photograph the Grade II Listed Chapel of Ease (1878), which has become dilapidated and really needs the masonry to be cleaned of general dirt and algae before its possible provenance can be determined, although its general physical characteristics are the same as those of the boundary walls and lodge. 

 

Views of the Chapel of Ease

Of particular interest was the massive red sandstone that has been used for the various dressings, which looks like the Matlock stone that has been seen in the later Sheffield Board Schools at Pomona Street, Western Road and Ranmoor. 

 

Massive red sandstone quoins at the Chapel of Ease

 

The chapel also has a very fine set of headstops on the various elevations, which are not even mentioned in the Historic England description - as at the Burngreave Cemetery chapels and Victorian churches at Pitsmoor Road, Netherthorpe and Broomhill among others, which have fine examples of stone carving. 

 

Headstops on the Chapel of Ease

 

A Geology Field Trip in Ashover

 

Galena

After my walk around the industrial east end of Sheffield, where I learned about its history of steel making and had a good look at the Ketton stone used in the former Thos. W. Ward premises, my next day out was with the Sheffield U3A Geology Group to Ashover. 

 

Ashover Rock

Meeting at the layby on Alton Lane, we started the day by having a quick look at Ashover Rock, known locally as the Fabrick, which had been the last place that we had visited on the recce a couple of weeks earlier. 

 

A view across Ashover from Ashover Rock

Our leader for the day Dave, a retired civil engineer, had visited Ashover on two further occasions to prepare the walk and he proceeded to introduce the Group to the geology of the area, including the Ashover anticline. Adding comments on the geology as required, I hovered around in the background to take photographs that might be used for the report on the day.

 

A geological cross-section of the Ashover anticline

Returning to the cars and parking at a convenient place in Ashover, we then had a very quick look inside All Saints church, noting the very rare Norman lead covered font, before heading down to the River Amber. Due to issues with the owners denying access, Dave had decided not to visit Butts Quarry and we carried on up the west side of the valley, which had exposures of the Fallgate Volcanic Formation in places. 

 

A path on the Fallgate Volcanic Formation

 

Taking a bit of a roundabout route along various public footpaths above the crags formed by the Eyam Limestone Formation, we had views of the grassland formed on the Bowland Shale Formation, where poorly drained ground was marked by an abundance of bog loving plants and above which rose a wooded escarpment of Ashover Grit. 

 

Grassland on the Bowland Shale Formation

We then made our way to the site of the former Gregory lead mine, which was one of the most productive in England during the C18, before it was closed in 1803 after working for 250 years. I would have liked to have spent a little longer looking through the spoil heap, especially since one of our group found a good specimen of what we thought was sphalerite. 

 

The spoil heap of the Gregory mine

Continuing on a route that we had not followed on the recce, we were led down past the Grade II Listed Ravensnest chimney – part of the engine house at the Gregory mine - to Overton Hall, where we had lunch and I took a few photos for the British Listed Buildings website. 

 

Overton Hall

Walking down past Milltown Quarry and old lead rakes, our next stop was Jetting Street, where we had a good look at the highly weathered pale turquoise coloured toadstone clay, which had orange stained inclusions in places. 

 

Toadstone clay

Removing one of these with my Estwing hammer, I was surprised to discover that it was rounded and slightly elongated and much harder than the clay that it was embedded in, which suggested that the inclusions could be lapilli. 

 

A lapillus in toadstone clay

 

After a year of it being stored in a sample bag, the specimen has dried out and started to exfoliate. Examining the fine orange sand like debris in the bag, there is an abundance of elongate colourless/off white crystals, which I think are plagioclase feldspars that have not been weathered – unlike the ferromagnesian minerals.

 

Exfoliation on the lapillus

Making our way to our last site at Hockley lime kilns, we passed by Fall Mill and, after talking with the owners, we were all invited into the building – now converted into a house - to see the internal mechanism of the water wheel, which would once have been linked to a grindstone but is now a feature in the kitchen. 

 

The interior of Fall Mill

 

At Hockley lime kiln, we inspected the green and purple tuff and noted the many calcite veins that criss-cross the exposure. In the various guide books that we had referred too, the exposures of tuff in the cutting to Hockley Quarry, which we did not visit, are recorded as containing lapilli and pumice but we did not see these. 

 

Hockley lime kilns

During our walk, we had passed by a couple of old limestone quarries and seen a small outcrop of the Monsal Dale Limestone Formation next to the lime kiln at Jetting Street but, quite surprisingly, we had not had a good look at the Carboniferous Limestone, which include the knoll reefs in the Eyam Limestone Formation that form crags on the west side of the valley. 

 

Knoll reefs in the Eyam Limestone Formation

Arriving back in Ashover, at the end of a 6 km on what had turned out to be a very warm day, we then convened at the Old Poets Corner public house where, as on the recce two weeks earlier, the pint of Everards Tiger was very welcome.

 

The Old Poets Corner

  

Thos. W. Ward on Attercliffe Road

 

Ketton limestone as seen through a hand lens

During my walk in the industrial east end of Sheffield, to photograph various buildings for the British Listed Buildings website, I encountered several sandstones in bridges and walls and various granites used for road setts, but the vast majority of these predominantly brick buildings have historical rather than architectural merit. 

 

The route of my walk

Along the way, I had encountered various information panels and plaques that informed me about the role of companies such as Firth-Brown in the manufacture of steel products in Sheffield and the discovery of stainless steel by Harry Brearley, as well as the magnificent steam hammer on the corner of Savile Street East/Sutherland Street in Brightside. 

 

The steam hammer at Brightside

Continuing along the Attercliffe Road towards Sheffield, I went to investigate a late Victorian brick building that I had passed several times on the bus, where an inscribed panel at its eastern end refers to the Ketton Cement Store. 

 

The former Thos. Ward Ltd buildings on Attercliffe Road

When devising the Triton Stone Library back in 1997, I included samples of stone that had developed a good reputation as a building stone, one of which was Ketton limestone from the village of Ketton in Rutland – a Jurassic oolite that has been widely used in many of the colleges at Cambridge University and also at Burleigh House, which I had once visited many years ago. 

 

The Ketton Cement Store

At the time, the sample was obtained from Castle Cement, which used most of the limestone extracted from a very large quarry to make cement, but which also supplied small quantities of dimensional stone and I was curious to know if there was any connection. 

 

A Google Earth view of Ketton

 

Getting much closer, I was therefore interested to see that the window surround contains a stone that is inscribed with the words Ketton Freestone and a C20 date that is now partially illegible, although old Ordnance Survey maps show that this and the adjoining Albion House were built between the publication of the 1855 and 1894 editions. 

 

Ketton freestone

 

When examining the various middle Jurassic oolitic limestones in the Triton Stone Library and my own collection, which includes those from the Great Oolite around Bath and the Cotswolds, Portland stone from Dorset and the Inferior Oolite (Lincolnshire Limestone Formation) in the East Midlands, the Ketton stone stood out from the rest in that it consists almost entirely of uniformly shaped and sized ooliths, with no shell fragments. Looking at the limestone in the window surrounds with my hand lens, this same pattern can be seen. 

 

Ketton limestone seen through a hand lens

Looking at the very large lintel above the two windows at the east end, although it has a very similar colour, it has cracks, crazing and a surface texture that looks very much like artificial stone. Having undertaken some internet research, I discovered that the Ketton Concrete Company was formed by Frank Walker, who made concrete blocks and sectional buildings. 

 

A detail of a concrete lintel

In 1927, capital was obtained from Joseph Ward, who was the chairman of Thos. W. Ward Ltd, which also had interests in coal, fuel, machinery, scrap metal, ship breaking and took its name from Thomas William Ward and, for most of its history, it was treated as a subsidiary company. 

 

An inscribed detail

The initials TWW are seen in inscribed lettering in the round arched recess of the first floor window which, like the other dressings, look like Huddersfield stone and it is likely that the Ketton stone and concrete window surround were installed as a showcase for these products. 

 

The entrance to the Portland Cement Store

Unknown to me at the time, Thos. W. Ward Ltd also occupied the substantial Albion Works on a site that lies between the Ketton Cement Store and the north bank of the River Don, with the adjoining Albion House being built to serve the growing shipbreaking business and which were the head office from 1902 to 1935. 

 

The Albion Works in 1903 and 2023

I didn’t take any general photos of the imposing Albion House, being more interested in the main doorway, which has a door of unknown age that is made of stainless steel, with at least three different granites being used for the surrounds. 

 

The entrance to Albion House

 

The jambs to the door are made in Shap light granite with a dark variety used for the large panels that form surrounds to the windows to either side of the doorway. These were both very popular in late Victorian buildings and can be seen in a few places in Sheffield city centre. 

 

Shap dark and light granites

 

The dark Shap granite is surrounded by another different grey granite, with large feldspar phenocrysts, which I immediately recognised as being from the Cornubian batholith that underlies much of Cornwall and Devon. One of the many business outlets of Thos. W. Ward Ltd was quarrying, with a lease held on the Cornish De Lank quarries – suppliers of biotite granite for Tower Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge – and it is therefore highly probable that this has been used here.  

De Lank (L) and dark Shap (R) granites