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| A sculpture on the doorway of Strathmore House on Sandygate |
Following on from my recce of Otley Chevin, for the next field trip of the Sheffield U3A Geology Group, my next day out involved a circular walk from Wath-upon-Dearne to West Melton, in Rotherham, to provide photographs for the British Listed Buildings website.
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| Listed buildings in Wath-upon-Dearne and West Melton |
As usual, I made this a reason to have a good look at the various building stones in the vernacular architecture and boundary walls, which reflect the underlying geology. On this occasion, it is the Oaks Rock in the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation that underlies the area – a sandstone that I had no doubt seen in the town during my last visit to All Saints church, but one that I had not closely investigated.
On the 1855 Ordnance Survey map, a few quarries are marked around Quarry Hill Lane, which was probably the main centre of the local quarrying industry, but there are others on the Oaks Rock and it is very probable that the majority of the historic buildings in Wath-upon-Dearne are built with sandstone from this formation.
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| Quarries marked on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map |
The British Geological Survey memoir, the Geology of the Country Around Barnsley (1947) describes the Oaks Rock as having a characteristic brown, yellow or light-yellow colour and being fine grained, often flaggy and current bedded. Alighting from the No. 22x bus on Manvers Way, I made my way up Staion Road to the mid C18 Nos. 54-56 High Street, where this colour variation with occasional reddening is seen, along with a considerable quantity of clay ironstone pellets.
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| Nos. 54-56 High Street |
Walking west along High Street to the corner of New Road, the unlisted No. 48, which also appears on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map, is built with a sandstone that is quite uniformly yellow/pale brown in colour, with differential weathering picking out both planar and cross-bedding.
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| No. 48 High Street |
Continuing along High Street, I passed various sandstone buildings, including a pair of late Victorian semi-detached houses at Nos.44-46, a cart shed (1745) to the rear of No. 22 and a former mid-late C18 house on the corner of Sandygate. The latter does not have tooled masonry, which collects dirt and makes it harder to see the colour variation, and it looks very similar to that seen at Nos. 54-56 – including the abundant clay ironstone pellets.
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| Various buildings on High Street |
Making my way up Sandygate to No. 34, the former early C19 blacksmith’s workshop, the sandstone used for this is quite yellow with iron banding and not particularly durable, with softer beds again being differentially weathered to reveal the cross-bedding.
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| No. 34 Sandygate |
Further up Sandygate, the batted finish of the masonry to Nos. 44-46 (1771) again slightly obscures the physical characteristics of the sandstone and, although there is a moderate amount of iron staining, much of the sandstone is light brown in colour.
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| Nos. 44-46 Sandygate |
Of those marked on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map, very many of the buildings on Sandygate still exist and nearly all of the older buildings are built in sandstone that is quite yellow/orange and not light brown, as I had seen in the buildings of High Street. The same map marks a quarry just to the south side of Sandygate and it is quite likely that the sandstone for its buildings came from here.
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| Various buildings on Sandygate |
Walking up to the corner with New Road, I was interested to see Strathmore House (1866), which has some interesting architectural details - including floriated capitals to the shafts in the bay window and to the front door and a figurative frieze sculpture to the trefoiled tympanum above.
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| Strathmore House |
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