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| The signpost to Doe Lea |
From the time of arriving in Ault Hucknall, it had only taken an hour and fifteen minutes to look at the exterior and interior of St. John’s church but, except to take a photograph of the Common Wealth War Graves Commission headstone of Private H. Oliver, of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, there was nothing else to see in the vicinity and I set off to catch the bus back to Chesterfield.
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| A detail of the headstone of Private H. Oliver |
When arriving in Ault Hucknall, I had taken the public footpath from Glapwell, which crossed muddy fields where the line of the path had been ploughed so, for my return journey, I decided to take the path that runs down through Hucknall Wood to Doe Lea.
Not long after I had left the main road, I could immediately see that the recently ploughed field to the east of the path exposed a red/brown soil that marks the position of the calcareous mudstone, which forms the base of the Cadeby Formation in this part of North-East Derbyshire.
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| A field underlain by calcareous mudstone |
The path follows the north-east edge of an outlier of the Cadeby Formation that has been separated from the main Magnesian Limestone escarpment by ancient tributaries of the River Meden, which flowed east from the watershed and cut down through the limestone plateau.
I continued along the path to the junction between Thompson’s Wood and Hucknall Wood, where it turns to the east and drops down the gentle escarpment. After a short distance, just a couple of metres beneath the level of the field to the south of the wood, I was interested to find a few very small rock exposures of rock beneath the tree roots.
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| The path through Hucknall Wood |
Although I did not have my Estwing hammer with me, I was determined to obtain a sample and, after finding a suitably stout piece of branch, I managed to prise out a piece of rock and break it against one of the small exposures.
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| A small rock exposue |
I carried on along the path down through the woods until I reached the western edge of Hucknall Wood, where there are views to the west towards the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation strata beyond Doe Lea.
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| A view from the edge of Hucknall Wood |
Examining the specimens of limestone that I had collected in the sunlight, both are very dense and contain a significant amount of very fine grained sand, with the larger piece being largely buff to pink in colour. The smaller piece has thin but distinct reddened calcareous mudstone layers, which have differentially weathered in a pattern that is very similar to those seen in the farm buildings and to the C19 restoration work to the north aisle of St. John’s church.
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| Samples of sandy dolomite |
A couple of years earlier, I had encountered a similar reddened limestone at Palterton and in some of the windows on the west elevation of St. Leonard’s church in Scarcliffe, which lie approximately 3 km to the north. It is very likely the old quarry marked on the 1884 Ordnance Survey map, 400 metres WNW of Ault Hucknall, worked similar stone and it is possible that this may be the source of stone for its farm buildings.
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| The 1884 Ordnance Survey map |
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