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| Dewsbury Minster |
At the end of the week commencing 18th July 2022, having had a day out with the Sheffield U3A Geology Group and been invited to see the interior of Catcliffe Glass Cone, I had a day out to Dewsbury, an old mill town with ancient origins, which I had briefly visited several years earlier when developing my Glowing Edges Designs.
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| Dewsbury Minster |
Having arrived on the bus from Wakefield, I immediately set off to Dewsbury Minster and, when approaching the north elevation, I could clearly see that the sandstones used for the tower and north aisle by John Carr (1767) and the eastern extension and clerestory (1884-87) by A.E. Street and A.H. Kirk, in a Decorated Gothic style, are very different.
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| The tower |
The C18 masonry is built with an iron stained sandstone that, although not possessing well defined banding and Liesegang rings, is variegated with buff to orange colouration within a single block of stone – a pattern that I can’t recall seeing before in the Coal Measures sandstones during my travels around South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and West Yorkshire.
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| The tower and south aisle |
This strongly contrasts with the generally uniform buff colour of the stone that has been used for the south aisle (1895), which replaced the original south aisle that was added by Carr. Looking closely at my photographs of the masonry in the tower and north aisle, I can see that clay ironstone pebbles are quite common.
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| The north aisle |
Having only been in Dewsbury for less than 10 minutes, I hadn’t been able to get a feel for the physical characteristics of the stone used in its historic buildings and, with Dewsbury Minster being built before the Calder and Hebble Navigation was finished, I assume that this sandstone had been quarried locally.
According to the section on economic geology in the geological memoir (1930), the Thornhill Rock from the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation is one of the most important sandstones in the Coal Measures and is still being quarried on a large scale to the north of Dewsbury.
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| The distribution of quarries around Dewsbury |
The memoir further states that in Morley, where the quarries are less than 5 km away, the Thornhill Rock constitutes an excellent freestone, with the Building Stones Database for England map also showing a concentration of quarries in the area.
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| The north transept |
Walking quickly around the Minster, it appears that the sandstone used for the major phase of rebuilding is very similar to the one used for the south aisle, but I only took a few general record photographs and didn’t closely examine the stone.
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| The east end |
By the mid C19, several railways had been established in West Yorkshire to improve the efficiency and profitability of transporting textile products to international markets, which also led to the better quality sandstones from around Huddersfield, Halifax and Bradford being used in the town halls and many other prestigious buildings in the growing towns of West Yorkshire and beyond.
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| The south elevation |
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