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| The Bulls Head public house in Ranmoor |
After having a quick look at Cairns Chambers and Steel City House, which added to my knowledge of the historic architecture of Sheffield, I caught the No. 120 bus from West Street to Ranmoor – where I met Jane Bartholomew of the Fulwood History Group. She had asked me if I could provide some background information on the geology and building stones, for a project on the history of Fulwood Road that she was preparing.
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| The walk along Fulwood Road |
We started our very short walk at the Bulls Head public house, which I hadn’t investigated when preparing my illustrated talk for the Ranmoor Society. It is built with very coarse grained probably sandstone, which I explained was Chatsworth Grit from one of the quarries in the Rivelin Valley.
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| Pebbly Chatsworth Grit at the Bulls Head public house |
For the next hour and a half, we continued up Fulwood Road and, taking various diversions, stopped to look at road setts, kerbs, paving, boundary walling and their coping stones and gatepiers, which are made from Chatsworth Grit and other sandstones that have been quarried locally from the Rough Rock and the Crawshaw Sandstone.
Along this stretch of Fulwood Road, Land Societies played a great part in the development of Ranmoor and a feature of the area is the development of large, well planted gardens that are generally in proportion to the size of the substantial detached and semi-detached villas, which were built for the middle classes.
In very many of these gardens, massive boulders of sandstone cleared from the building plots have been used for landscaping. At the end of the last ice age, by the process of solifluction, blocks of stone that had become detached from the bedrock on the high ground to the north moved downslope and littered the land – as seen in many of the undeveloped areas on the upland outskirts of Sheffield.
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| Large boulders of sandstone used for landscaping |
When we reached Nether Green Junior School, I was interested to see that work was being undertaken to the building during the school summer holiday and I popped into the site office to ask the site manager about the work that was being carried out.
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| The Birch site office |
Although the main work was to the roof and general maintenance, I explained that this school was known to be built with Crawshaw Sandstone from Bole Hill in Crookes and that, as a geologist, I would be interested in obtaining a piece if any was removed. I took his details and said that I would keep in touch but, with other things keeping me busy over the summer, nothing came of this.
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| The Sheffield architectural guide |
Leaving Jane at this point, with a promise to turn up to meet other members of the Fulwood History Group the Fulwood Fete in a couple of weeks, I made my way down to Endcliffe Park, where I purchased a copy of the Pevsner Architectural Guide for Sheffield from Next Chapter Books.
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| Igneous rocks from Sweden, Norway and Scotland |
I could easily have caught a bus back to Sheffield city centre from here, but I instead decided to take another look at Sheffield General Cemetery, which I had last visited in December 2021 – starting with the large blocks of Swedish Imperial Red Granite, Norwegian larvikite and Rubislaw granite from Aberdeen in Scotland.
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| The base of the catacombs at Sheffield General cemetery |
In the interim, £3.8 million had been spent on its refurbishment, was very near to completion, with a substantial amount of work being undertaken to the catacombs, which had fallen into a state of considerable disrepair. I didn’t examine the new stonework in any detail, but it is probably either Crosland Hill stone from Huddersfield or Stoke Hall stone from Grindleford – both of which have been used extensively in Sheffield.
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| Restoration of the balustrade |
My friend Catherine from the Sheffield U3A Geology Group had volunteered to organise the September 2023 field trip and I was particularly interested to see how how the Geological Stone Spiral looked. It was installed back in 2004 and, by the time of my last visit, the fresh surfaces had become very obscured by a combination of weathering, algal growth and dirt.
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| The Geological Stone Spiral |
This made it difficult to distinguish the various rocks and, with such a large budget for the project, I had expected these to have been cleaned with a high pressure washer; however, I was very surprised to see that they were in the same condition and soil had been piled up around the stones, from which weeds were growing.
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| The Geological Stone Spiral |
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