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