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| Ironstone in walling |
During my day out to Eckington, it had taken just over two hours to find the buildings that I wanted to photograph for the British Listed Buildings website and it wasn’t yet 2 o’clock in the afternoon. On my way back to Sheffield on the 50a Gold bus, I decided to take advantage of the afternoon sunshine by going to have a quick look at Hackenthorpe.
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| The 1882 Ordnance Survey map of Hackenthorpe |
Although now dominated by 20th century housing, Hackenthorpe is an ancient settlement that dates back to the Neolithic period and thrived after the industrial revolution, with scythe and sickle making, quarrying and coal mining.
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| Christ Church |
Getting off the bus at the Birley Moor Road/Birley Lane stop, I then took the Supertram from Birley Moor Road to Hackenthorpe and headed down Sheffield Road towards the village, where I immediately encountered Christ Church, which was built in 1899 to the design of John Dodsley Webster and extended in 1999, as recorded by inscriptions on both sides of the new entrance.
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| Inscriptions on the new entrance |
I didn’t spend any time closely examining the various sandstones used for both the original church and the new extensions, but they are all quite different to the very iron rich and often orange coloured sandstone that is quite typical of the historic buildings that I seen earlier in Eckington.
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| A detail of the masonry at Christ Church |
The walling is built with planar bedded, light brown Coal Measures sandstone and a slightly pink massive sandstone – probably a Derbyshire gritstone – used for the dressings, but the quoins to the buttresses, however, are made of a finer grey bodied cross-laminated sandstone, which has weathered bright orange.
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| A detail of a buttress at Christ Church |
All of these are used in the same way as very similar sandstones used for the nearby Mosborough Methodist church (1888), by James Kerridge. The walling stone for the new extension is a coarse grained sandstone with Liesegang rings, which I don’t recall seeing before and the dressings, although massive, have visible planar bedding that I am not familiar with.
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| Hackenthorpe war memorial |
After taking a couple of photos of the Grade II Listed Hackenthorpe war memorial, which photos on the War Memorials Online website shows was once painted, I continued down Sheffield Road and Beighton Road until I reached the early C18 Greenside House, the home of the sickle and scythe manufacturer Thomas Staniforth.
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| Greenside House |
The double bow windowed house is built with large sandstone ashlar blocks that appear to be quite uniform in colour, beneath the patina and the patchy covering of dirt, but zooming in to the photos that I took, I can discern some feint iron banding and a scattering of clay ironstone pellets.
Hackenthorpe is set on a small outcrop of an unnamed Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation (PLCMF) sandstone, but the Parkgate Rock, Silkstone Rock and Woodhouse Rock are just a short distance awayl; however, I have not seen ashlar masonry like this in any of the areas where these formations are quarried for building stone.
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| The garden wall at Greenside House |
The front garden wall of Greenside House provides a good example of the ferruginous nature of the PLCMF strata, with dense concentrations of iron oxides/hydroxides standing out proud against the body of the sandstone where these have been differentially weathered.
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| Views of the Staniforth Works |
On the corner of Beighton Road and Main Street is the Staniforth Works, the former premises of Thomas Staniforth’s sickle and scythe business, which is now a mixed used development comprising offices, retail units and workshops. As seen in Eckington and Mosborough, the iron rich sandstone used here, with light brown, orange and dark rusty brown colour variation, is typical of building stone seen in the area.
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| Hackenthorpe Hall |
I then went to have a quick look at Main Street, which the 1882 ordnance Survey map shows with many large presumably agricultural buildings alongside it, but these have nearly all been demolished and replaced with C20 housing and I didn’t go beyond Hackenthorpe Hall (1875).
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| Hackenthorpe Hall |
It is built with sandstone that contains a significant amount of iron staining but, as a high status building, no doubt greater care was taken to select stone of a more uniform colour than used for basic cottages, agricultural and industrial buildings, where brick is also used. The hall is now occupied by a nursery, which had children in the playground at the time, so I just took a quick discrete photo through the gates and made my way back to Sheffield Road.
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| Ironstone in walling |
Throughout the day, I had become very aware of the very high iron content of the PLCMF and its great importance to the local industries, and the walling of what I assume to be another old workshop, opposite the Staniforth Works, contains blocks of sandstone that contain Liesegang rings that have been further transformed into seams of ironstone.
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| A band of ironstone |
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