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| An old quarry face at Hagg Stones |
When preparing my trip to Worrall, my idea had been to quickly photograph its listed buildings and then a walk down to Oughtibridge, where I would then provide further photographs for the British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge.
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| 1855 and 1894 maps of Hagg Stones |
Looking at various old Ordnance Survey maps as part of my research, I was interested to see that the area named Hagg Stones, between Worrall and Oughtibridge, was once an area of quarrying, which expanded considerably in the period between the publication of the 1855 and 1894 maps. Together with smaller quarries to the north-west of Middleton Hall, it seems reasonable to assume that these were the principal suppliers of stone for the buildings in Worrall and Oughtibridge from the Mid C19 to the early C20.
These old quarries are set on the Loxley Edge Rock, a formation that appears in several places in Sheffield and forms some local landforms, but which I had only seen in outcrop at Loxley Edge, where it is massive and very coarse grained.
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| The path down into Hagg Stones |
Taking the path from Boggard Lane, I dropped down into Hagg Stones via a purpose built path, with a handrail and thick crazy paving slabs forming the steps. For a short while, I could only see heavily vegetated piles of rock face, but it wasn’t long before I came across an exposure of massive sandstone, with overlying thick flaggy beds.
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| Massive sandstone at Hagg Stones |
Moving off the footpath, which during the first part of my walk was running perpendicular to the line of the old quarry face, I came across further examples of massive sandstone with well developed large scale cross-bedding, with the joint faces being distinctly iron stained.
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| Cross-bedded massive sandstone |
Returning to the footpath, it wasn’t long before I came to a junction with another footpath that runs WNW – ESE through Haggs Stones at a distance of approximately 80 metres from the old quarry face, which runs to the north side of Boggard Lane.
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| A quarry face |
Heading along this path past an area of woodland and heavily overgrown heaps of waste rock, it eventually turned back towards the quarry face, where quite an extensive length of massive sandstone can be seen at the western end of Hagg Stones.
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| An extensive quarry face |
The extensive quarry face at the west end is largely comprised of massive sandstone, with very large scale cross-bedding but, as with many other Coal Measures sandstones that I have seen, the upper parts are often flaggy, with the uppermost beds being opened up by weathering processes at the surface.
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| Flaggy beds |
The massive nature of the quarry face, with no obvious ledges or protrusions, made it difficult to obtain specimens from the in situ rock, but I hacked off some small samples from one of the larger blocks lying around the rock face.
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| Specimens of coarse grained Loxley Edge Rock |
The sandstone is composed of coarse grained sand, with possibly weathered feldspar and degraded iron bearing minerals that gives the body of the stone a pink to orange/brown colouration, with a bleached rim to the weathered surface of the specimen. One of the loose lying slabs of flaggy sandstone that I sampled, however, is fine grained and has a finely laminated texture - a characteristic that I had not associated with the Loxley Edge Rock.
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| A specimen of fine grained Loxley Edge Rock |
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