Moorgate Cemetery in Rotherham

 

The chapel by Samuel Worth at Moorgate Cemetery

Following my trip to Bolsterstone at the beginning of February 2023, my next day out coincided with one of the regular sessions that Janet Worrall arranges at the Grade II Listed Boston Park, where the Friends of Moorgate Cemetery are clearing the cemetery of vegetation and restoring a sunken garden known as The Dell.

 

The entrance to Moorgate Cemetery on Boston Castle Grove

 

Since meeting Steve Roche at his workshop in Sheffield, I had arranged for Janet to meet him to discuss her idea of having a sculpture made from the Rotherham Red sandstone that had been retained after excavations for the new reservoirs at Boston Park. She had also asked me if I could come to have a look at The Dell, which she thought may originally have been a quarry. 

 

A LIDAR map of Boston Park

 

Based on my experience of the geology of Boston Park and Canklow Woods and looking at the LIDAR map, I didn’t think that it was a quarry but it gave me a reason to get out of the house and have a quick look at the monuments in the Grade II Listed Moorgate Cemetery – especially since my friend Catherine from the Sheffield U3A Geology Group had asked me to give a talk on ‘gravestone geology’ for the Bolsterstone Graveyard Project later in the year.

 

Views of The Dell

 

A quick look at The Dell confirmed my original thoughts and I then proceeded to look for the many Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstones that can be found in Moorgate Cemetery, which I will describe later, as well as examples of granites and marble that might help me with my November talk. 

 

Various headstones and memorials in Moorgate Cemetery

The cemetery opened in 1841 and, as I had seen at several Victorian cemeteries in Sheffield, the earliest memorials consist of large slabs of fine grained sandstone, which I presume come from quarries in Sheffield where the Brincliffe Edge Rock – a local name for the Greenmoor Rock – was worked for top quality headstones. 

 

Various headstones and memorials in Moorgate Cemetery

 

On this occasion, I was more interested in the numerous pink, red and grey granites and, as with St. Mary’s churchyard in Bolsterstone, I was reliant on Dr. Eric Robinson’s London Illustrated Geological Walks and my old Natural Stone Directory to help me with the identification of these. 

 

Decorative Stone: The Complete Handbook by Monica Price

 

As a specialist in stone matching, a skill that I learned when establishing Triton Building Restoration Ltd, I bought the large glossy hardcover book entitled Decorative Stone: The Complete Sourcebook by Monica Price after visiting Leeds Minster. I have to say that partly because it concentrates on the Corsi Collection, which has an emphasis on stones used by the Romans, it doesn't really help geologists like myself who advise on the best stone that could used for the restoration of historic buildings and monuments in the UK. 

 

Photographs of various granites by Peter Kennett

 

A geologist colleague Peter Kennett, who spent most of his working life at High Storrs school in Sheffield, produced a guide to building stones aimed at pupils of all ages, which is designed to be used in town centres and graveyards or cemeteries where the stones illustrated are common. 

 

Various headstones and memorials in Moorgate Cemetery

 

In the part of the cemetery between the entrance and the chapel, the larger later Victorian and Edwardian monuments, which include crosses and obelisks, are made from Scottish pink and grey granites that include varieties from Peterhead, Rubislaw and Kemnay, which are all from the area around Aberdeen and were formed during the Caledonian Orogeny – aprroximately 475-390 million years ago (Ma). 

 

Headstones made of granite from the Cornubian Batholith

 

Moving away from the oldest part of the cemetery, I noticed that several headstones and kerbs ranging from 1935 to 1944 are made in grey granite from the Cornubian Batholith under Cornwall and Devon, which was formed during the Variscan Orogeny approximately 280 Ma. 

 

The Cornubian Batholith

The grey granites are mainly composed of quartz, plagioclase feldspar, alkali feldspar, biotite mica and muscovite mica, with these varying in quantity where exposed in the various plutons spread across the district. Those that I have seen tend to have quite large phenocrysts of white alkali feldspar, but the textures again can be extemely variable. 

 

The tomb of James Yates

 

The monument to James Yates (1881) is built with a massive sandstone that has been used to form four large obelisks set on large plinths, which are linked by iron railings that were made in his foundry. Although thick slabs of Greenmoor Rock at Brincliffe Edge in Sheffield were used for more substantial monuments, in addition to traditional headstones, the railway connections to West Yorkshire were by now well established and it is probable that the sandstone for this monument came from onf the quarries there. 

 

The headstone of Charlotte and William Binney

 

I wasn't taking much notice of the later C20 headstones in the cemetery, but a couple of these did catch my eye. Firstly was the headstone of Charlotte and William Binney (1965), which is made with volcanic green slate from the Borrowdale Volcanic Group in Cumbria and the granite headstone dedicated to various members of the Elmhirst family. 

 

A memorial to members of the Elmhirst family

 

Although I could see from its mineralogy and texture that it is a high grade metamorphic rock, I had no idea where this very attractive and distinctive rock came from; however, trying Google Lens, which I had used once to try and identify a granite without much success, the search results came up with Paradiso or Indian Juparana granite from the Tamil Nadu state in the very south of India – a 1.8 billion year old migmatite formed by partial re-melting of granite and slate. 

 

A detail of the Emhirst family uploaded to Google Lens

 

On this occasion, I just had a quick wander around the cemetery to take a few general photos of the different variety of stones that I encountered, without looking at any of them in any detail. Before leaving the cemetery, I stopped at the Cross of Sacrifice, which is made in a medium grained sandstone that is quite likely to be Stancliffe Darley Dale stone, which is often used for the CWGC headstones in South Yorkshire.

 

The Cross of Sacrifice

 

The Escarpment at Bolsterstone

 

A view from the escarpment at Bolsterstone

On my first visit to Bolsterstone, I had a quick wander around the village to photograph its listed buildings, including the Porter’s Lodge and Castle Cottage - considered to contain vestiges of Bolsterstone Castle, a late mediaeval manor house that may have been fortified, but of which there is scant documentary or physical evidence. 

 

An Ordnance Survey map showing the public footpaths

 

I followed this up with another visit to St. Mary’s churchyard, to prepare for a future talk on the geology of the headstones for the Bolsterstone Graveyard Project. This took just over an hour and, after taking advantage of the homemade soup and refreshments served during the Wednesday coffee morning at St. Mary’s church, Catherine wanted to take a short walk along the footpath that runs east along the escarpment of Rough Rock that overlooks the Ewden Valley. 

 

The geological map showing the outcrop of the Rough Rock

 

Crossing over the stile at the west end of the public footpath at Heads Lane, she pointed out a section of a dry stone wall, which forms the southern boundary of the field where Bolsterstone Castle is believed to have been located.

 

A Google Map view of Bolsterstone

 

Stopping to have a quick look at this, without examining the various stones with my hand lens, I could immediately see that it didn’t look like a typical dry stone wall, which is built with two outer skins, a rubble core and with through stones to make it structurally stable. 

 

A view of the boundary wall

 

Dry stone walling is a fine art, with great care being taken to ensure that each stone carefully fits alongside its neighbours, but this wall is composed of a single skin that is full of gaps that I could see right through. The very large blocks look like they have been roughly squared to be originally used as a walling stone for a building, not a boundary wall, and Catherine suggested that perhaps these had been recycled from Bolsterstone Castle, which seemed reasonable to me. 

 

Another view of the boundary wall

 

Continuing along the path, the pattern of walling stone changes from large massive blocks to much smaller and thinner stones, which is commonly seen in many parts of South Yorkshire that are underlain by finer grained flaggy sandstones such as the Greenmoor Rock and Penistone Flags. 

 

Flaggy sandstone used in the boundary wall

 

When looking at St. Mary's church, I quickly noticed that it is built out of a very coarse sandstone that, largely based on the references to Allman Well Hill quarries in the British Geological Survey memoir, I thought was very likely to be Loxley Edge Rock. Although I didn’t stop to closely examine any of the boundary walls and the houses in Bolsterstone, I could see that the sandstone used for these is massive and coarse grained. 

 

Another view of flaggy sandstone in the boundary wall

 

My experience of the Rough Rock further to the south, around Whirlow, is that it is much finer grained and flaggy, not massive and gritty, with it being widely used for paving and stone slates. Continuing further east along the footpath, the boundary wall is predominantly built out of flaggy sandstone and eventually we came to a wooded area downslope of the escarpment, which Catherine informed me was the site of a few old quarries, one of which was still marked as working on the 1:25,000 scale 1893 Ordnance Survey map. 

 

Bolsterstone on the 1:25,000 scale 1893 Ordnance Survey map

I followed the adjoining boundary wall down the slope and, although I could get glimpses of sandstone exposures, I didn’t see any obvious way to get easy access and, not having my Estwing hammer with me and with rain threatening, we decided not to investigate this further. 

 

The site of an old quarry on the Rough Rock escarpment

 

Although bus services to Bolsterstone no longer operate and those to Stocksbridge are infrequent, which hinder my efforts to get to the area, Catherine informed me that there were various quarries and other points of interest in the area and we could investigate these later in the year. 

 

A panoramic view of the Ewden Valley

 

The Bolsterstone Graveyard Project 2

 

A detail of the headstone of Wilfred Moorhouse

My visit to the workshop of Steve Roche, following on from my talk on the subject of metamorphic rocks, had got 2023 off to a good start and, the next day, this continued with another visit to Bolsterstone with my friend Catherine from the Sheffield U3A Geology Group.

 

A sandstone headstone in St. Mary's churchyard

 

Shortly after our January indoor meeting, when Catherine had volunteered to lead the group around Sheffield General Cemetery, she asked me if I would be interested in giving a talk on the ‘geology’ of St. Mary’s churchyard in November – as part of the Bolsterstone Graveyard Project. 

 

An article in the Burngreave Messenger

 

A year earlier, following a Language of Stone Blog post on the educational potential of Burngreave Cemetery, I had been asked to write an article for the Burngreave Messenger and, having visited many churchyards and cemeteries to look for Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, this just seemed like a natural progression. 

 

The headstone of Ann Hayward

 

It had always been my intention to pay another visit to St. Mary’s churchyard, to help Catherine to recognise some of the stones that are most common commonly used for headstones and memorials. The first headstone that we stopped at was of Ann Hayward (1884), made in the pink Peterhead granite of Silurian age from the Aberdeenshire coast, where only its face is polished.

A detail of the headstone of Ann Hayward

This was used widely in the later C19 for large memorials and obelisks in cemeteries and in buildings such as banks, where it was often combined with other Scottish granites, and it forms colonettes on the headstone of Ida Ruth Addy (1896). 

 

A colonnette

 

Near to the west end of the church is a series of greyish coloured later C19 headstones which, when I felt them with my fingers and saw the positive reaction with a drop of hydrochloric acid, I established are made of white marble. 

 

Headstones made from white marble

 

The marble is very probably from Carrara, in the Apuan Alps of Italy, which I have seen used for Victorian figurative sculptures in many cemeteries, but I can't recall seeing it used for so many elaborate headstones like these before. 

 

Headstones made from white marble

 

The steelworks in Stocksbridge, which once extended for more than 3.5 km along the river valley, is to the north and therefore upwind of Bolsterstone, but the buildings in Bolsterstone have been severely blackened by the industrial pollution. Even when just subjected to carbonic acid found in rainwater, marble weathers rapidly in external locations and it is only the plain headstone to Joseph Kenworthy (1929) where the inscription is completely legible. 

 

The headstone of Jessie Button

Moving on to the headstone of Jessie Button (1905), I had to admit to Catherine that I could only make an educated guess about the provenance of the pale grey granite, which does not have any well developed phenocrysts but does have small flecks of biotite mica that stand out against the background of quartz and feldspar. 

 

A detail of the headstone of Jessie Button

 

When I devised the Triton Stone Library back in 1996, which has since been relocated to Sheffield Hallam University and is waiting to be re-displayed, I used my Natural Stone Directory to select 6 samples of granite from Scotland, 4 from England and 4 from the Republic of Ireland - to fill a limited space of 140 stone samples, which would help their day to day stone matching work as one of London's leading building restoration contractors. 

 

British granites in the 1994-1995 Natural Stone Directory

 

From the late C18, the principal areas of granite production were Aberdeenshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, Devon and Cornwall, Ross of Mull and Shap in Cumbria but, by the time the library was designed, very few quarries were supplying granite for dimensional stone. 

 

Illustrated Geological Walks in London - Part 1

 

Using the Natural Stone Directory and Dr. Eric Robinson's London Illustrated Geological  Walks, I acquired a working knowledge of no more than 20 of the most common granites used in London's late Victorian and Edwardian buildings and monuments – including those imported from Scandinavia, such as the Blue Pearl and Emerald Pearl varieties of larvikite and the orbicular granite known as Baltic Brown.

 

Illustrated Geological Walks in London - Part 2

 

When working in the building restoration industry many years ago, I only know of one occasion that Triton Building Restoration Ltd were contacted by the Mercers' Company - to restore a monument that is made in the now unavailable Devonian Shap granite – but to the best of my knowledge nothing ever came of this. 

 

 21st century headstones

 

Continuing our walk past the most recent burials in the churchyard, I just took a couple of photos of the ‘black granites’, which once mainly came from the Bushveld Intrusion in South Africa, but are now imported in vast quantities from China and India. 

 

Various red granites

 

We encountered various other red granite headstones, dating from 1897 to 1990, but although I would say that the late Victorian headstone of Thomas Brooke is likely to be from the Transsandinavian igneous belt, which underlies much of Sweden and Norway, it needs a specialist in granite to identify all of these. 

 

A detail of the headstone of Wilfred Moorhouse

 

One particularly unusual stone is found in the headstone of Wilfred Moorhouse (1916), which is pervaded by elongated crystals of the very dark green/black mineral hornblende, a texture that I have only seen before in London, where riven Otta schist from Norway has been used for cladding; however, I did not see any garnet, which is one of its principal minerals. 

 A colonnette made of red granite

The elaborately carved sandstone headstone of George Knowles (1899) has colonnettes of another red granite which, given its date, is probably another variety of igneous rock brought to Aberdeen from Scandinavia for processing. 

 

 A cross made in dark grey granite

 

I simply haven’t studied granites enough, in natural outcrops or in buildings, to make more than a few general observations on their mineralogy and textures and I readily defer to geologists who have spent more time out in the field than me – to investigate this specialist subject.

 

A cross made from Emerald Pearl

 

A Visit to the Workshop of Steve Roche

 

Maquettes carved from breeze blocks

The preparation of my talk to the Sheffield U3A Geology Group at the January indoor meeting, on the subject of metamorphic rocks, got 2023 off to a good start and I next turned my thoughts to the blocks of Rotherham Red sandstone that had been retained from excavation work for the new reservoirs behind Boston Park in Rotherham. 

 

Blocks of Rotherham Red sandstone retained by Yorkshire Water

 

Having already contacted various members of staff at the Diocese of Sheffield, to inform them of a resource that could be potentially used for the repair of several churches built out of this locally distinctive sandstone, after being notified of these by Janet Worrall, I decided to follow up on her idea to have a sculpture made for Boston Park. 

 

The Sheffield Flood 1864 sculpture at Malin Bridge

 

During a telephone conversation, she had informed me that Yorkshire Water had proposed Andrew Vickers of Stoneface Creative to do this but, having seen a lot of his work that I think is quite crude, I suggested that she might want to consider Steve Roche – a trained stonemason, letter cutter and sculptor, whose work I had seen at Malin Bridge.

 

An information panel at Sheffield Flood 1864

 

The theme of the relief sculpture, which is carved on to a wall next to the River Loxley at the entrance to the Lidl supermarket, is the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864. Each of the items is taken from the reparation claims archive and are things that were important in local businesses and that people valued in their homes, with the grandfather clock being set to a few minutes to midnight - the time Dale Dyke Dam collapsed. 

 

Stags' heads sculpture

Ever since I was commissioned by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) in 1993, to photograph as many examples of post-war architectural sculpture that I could find, I have kept my eyes open for good examples of architectural sculpture on buildings of all ages and public sculpture wherever I go. 

 

A detail of the stags' heads sculpture by Steve Roche

 

Ultimately, it was the decision of Janet Worrall and other members of the Friends of Boston Park and Castle to choose the artist for this project, but I had been campaigning for many years to get the excellent geology at Boston Park conserved and interpreted and I was therefore more than willing to help her with this. 

 

The entrance to Stag Works

 

All of this depended on obtaining funding to pay for it and, having been told that Yorkshire Water were making a significant payment to Rotherham MBC to make improvements to Boston Park, I decided to take the initiative and arranged to meet Steve Roche at his workshop at the Grade II Listed Stag Works on John Street in Sheffield. 

 

The former Clifton Works

 

Unlike textile manufacturing towns such as Halifax and Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, where the prosperity of the businesses is recorded in the very many magnificent Victorian stone buildings that are still seen in their town centres, the brick built back street industrial buildings of Sheffield are much more modest; however, the business owners were equally keen to promote their wares and it is good to see that this aspect of Sheffield’s industrial heritage is retained, instead of being replaced by soulless blocks of flats. 

 

The former Harland Works

 

Over a cup of tea, I sat down with Steve to explain the situation with the blocks of Rotherham Red sandstone that had become available, a stone that he had not worked with before. I highlighted the fact that it is not a particularly hard stone and, containing variable quantities of clay ironstone nodules, would not be considered to be a first class stone. 

 

Like Sort of Like in Cumbrian slate

 

With Steve making a deliberate decision in recent years to develop his calligraphic and letter cutting skills, it was not surprising to discover that Welsh and Cumbrian slate were his favoured materials and examples of these were lying around the workshop. 

 

Dare Mighty Things in Cumbrian slate

 

Having surveyed very many buildings constructed in Rotherham Red sandstone, although capable of being carved into gargoyles and grotesques, I knew that it wasn’t very suited to lettering and I was interested to learn that Steve had made the stags' heads sculpture that I had encountered at Cutlers Court during one of my walks in Sheffield. 

 

Labyrinth Thumbprints

 

The longer that I spoke to Steve about his various public sculpture projects and how e works with his clients, the more that I liked the approach to his work - particularly the Labyrinth Thumbprints, which I had also encountered when exploring Mosborough. 

 

An abstract sculpture on the wall

 

Although my own experience of working stone is limited to sawing White Mansfield, Ancaster Weatherbed, Ancaster Hard White and Chilmark for a few months at the Gregory’s Quarry for a few months, as a former building restoration contractor and a photographer of countless historic buildings and monuments, I could tell that Steve’s work is produced to a very high standard. 

 

A sandstone headstone

 

The Stag Works are now home to a very diverse range of businesses, with Steve’s small workshop not possessing the saws and lifting gear that are usually found in purpose built stone yards, but he seems to cope remarkably well and has close collaborators who can help him out if necessary. 

 

A view of the workshop

 

Sharing a common passion for stone, we could have talked for hours but I didn’t want to take up more of his time, when Jane's good idea had not yet received financial backing. I had learned a few things and, as a geologist, I was very interested to see a sculpture that had been made out of purple Welsh slate, but which contained beds of green volcanic ash that is typically seen in the slates from Cumbria.

A Welsh slate sculpture with beds of volcanic ash