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| A worksheet for my day out to Horbury and Ossett |
After a very slow start to 2024 due to the very wet weather, although I did manage to get out to Cressbrook Dale and Pilsley in the Peak District National Park, the first week of April was spent taking another look at the urban geology of Sheffield – an initial visit to Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park, a recce of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens and Ecclesall Road for the next Sheffield U3A Geology Group field trip and a second visit to Wardsend Cemetery.
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| A Google Map view of the country between Treeton and Horbury |
For my next day out, I decided to visit the Grade I Listed Church of St. Peter and St. Leonard (1791-1793) in Horbury, by the pre-eminent architect of the C18 in the north of England, John Carr, who was born in the town and designed and financed this as his final resting place.
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| The Building Stone Atlas of West & South Yorkshire |
I had taken notice of a reference to this in the Building Stone Atlas of West & South Yorkshire, first published in 2012 as part of the Strategic Stone Study, when I was very interested to see that the very distinctive striped sandstone was described as being the Woolley Edge Rock, which I thought I had seen at Sandal Castle and St. Helen’s church in Sandal Magna and at Wakefield Cathedral and the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin in Wakefield.
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| The Building Stones of England - West and South Yorkshire |
The revised version produced by Historic England in 2023 as part of the Building Stones of England series, however, describes it as Horbury Rock. I have been very reliably informed that this was undertaken as a desk top study, which would explain some glaring errors and omissions, particularly for South Yorkshire - where I possess a very good working knowledge of its geology, building stones and historic buildings.
During my trip to Woolley the previous October, I had seen more examples of the Woolley Edge Rock in very many historic buildings in the village and at an old quarry on my walk from Wooley to Darton, where All Saints church is built from distinctly cross-bedded coarse grained sandstone that I think is from this formation.
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| Listed buildings in Horbury |
Although I had encountered several Victorian churches and a few Georgian churches on my travels, I had not made any effort to travel a long way to find them. In early 2023, when drawing up a long list of places to potentially visit in the year, a British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge for Horbury showed that, except for the church, more than 20 buildings required a photograph but, by the time of my visit, all of these had been photographed by other people.
Being determined to visit Horbury anyway, I decided that I would also go and see Ossett, where the Grade II* Listed Church of the Holy Trinity forms a very prominent landmark that I had seen very many times when driving up the M1 motorway.
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| An extract from the No. 126 bus timetable |
This was made easy by the fact that the No. 126 bus from Wakefield to Dewsbury runs every 15 minutes and the journey from Horbury to Ossett only takes 10 minutes and, entering a postcode for a Photo Challenge for Ossett, I found 4 buildings in Ossett and another in South Ossett.
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| Listed buildings in Ossett |
To make my day complete, I discovered that Horbury Quarry had been identified by the West Yorkshire Geology Trust as a Local Geological Site, where an expanse of the Horbury Rock is still visible and, after I had walked back from Ossett, I could get to it easily from a public footpath.
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| The location of Horbury Quarry |
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