Stanton in Peak - Part 2

 

The Reading Room

Continuing my British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge for Stanton in Peak, having already photographed its rear elevation from Holy Trinity churchyard, I turned up Park Lane to take photos of the front elevation of the Grade II Listed Ivy House and its separately listed gatepiers and wall. 

 

Views of Ivy House

As with Yew Tree Cottage on Main Road, the thick hedges partially obscured my view of this late C17 house with C18 and C19 additions, but I could see that the original house, built in the local buff/red coloured Ashover Grit, still retains its stone slate roof but those of the northern extension have been replaced with plain Staffordshire blue tiles. 

 

The north elevation of the house attached to Ivy House

The next building on my list was the late C18 house attached to the west elevation of Ivy House, which again has had itsl stone slate roof replaced with tiles, rather than the usual Welsh slate, which makes me wonder if the Thornhill family had connections with the Staffordshire Potteries. 

 

The south elevation of the house attached to Ivy House

At the junction of Park Lane and Middle Street, the north elevation of a large early C19 farm  outbuilding provides a reminder that, although quarrying dominated the economy of Stanton in Peak in the later part of the C19 and there was lead mining in the area, the settlement was foremost based on agriculture - as recorded by the entry in the Domesday Book. 

 

An old farm building at the junction of Park Lane and Middle Street

Heading down Middle Street, the first building that caught my eye was what I initially thought was a Methodist chapel but, getting closer, I could see an inscribed plaque that informed me that this was the Reading Room, which was built by Mrs. Thornhill Gell and presented to the parish in 1876 and is now used as the village hall. 

 

The Reading Room

On the opposite side of the road is the Grade II Listed Hall Gate Cottage, which dates to the late C18 and has C19 and C20 alterations. Originally a pair of cottages attached to another large agricultural building to the rear, it is only listed for its group value but provides another example of locally quarried Ashover Grit and blue plain tiles for the roof. 

 

Hall Gate Cottage

 

A little further down Middle Road, set back from the road, is the C17 Mount Cottage, which was altered in the C19. Again it is listed for its group value only and provides another example of gritstone with the original stone slates replaced by blue plain tiles and I just took a single photograph of it from the road. 

 

Mount Cottage

 

Immediately next to this,The Mount is built with its front elevation at right angles to the road and, with its its 3 bays and 3 storeys, this Neoclassical style late C18 house was by far the most substantial residence that I had so far encountered in the village. For some reason, which I didn't think about at the time, the upper central window and presumably the one below, which is now obscured by a climbing plant, have been blocked up. 

 

The Mount

 

According to the Conservation Area Appraisal, unlike Wentworth in South Yorkshire for example, the village wasn’t all tied and was once split between the Thornhill and Haddon Hall estates. Independent yeoman farmers have always lived in the village and a house such as this, which contrasts with the surrounding cottages, may well have been built by one of them. 

 

A detail of the 1898 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey map

 

The 1898 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey map shows that the houses to the north side of Middle Road have been crammed into a very small area of land, with very little space for gardens and this may explain the plot of land used as allotments in the centre of the village. 

 

Cedar Cottage

Butting against the south side of The Mount is the mid C18 Cedar Cottage, where the steeply pitched roof, ridge and gable end stone chimney stacks, coped gable, kneelers, mullioned windows and raised quoins and dressings are quite typical of the period. Here I got talking to the owner, who invited me in to look at the fireplace and gave me permission to photograph the house from the terraced garden on the opposite side of the road. 

 

The fireplace at Cedar Cottage

The adjoining late C18 Acorn Cottage is built with similar materials, with Staffordshire blue bricks also used for the chimney stacks, but it is more modest in its detailing and its flush quoins and window dressings are more akin to the cottages that I had seen elsewhere, although it appears to be a lot more spacious. 

 

Acorn Cottage

 

On the opposite side of the road is the quite substantial 4 bay Gould Cottage (1664), which has a tympanum above the door that has its date and the letters EGL carved in relief, with the lintel below inscribed with WT 1900. 

 

The tympanum and lintel at Gould Cottage

Historic England description states that the house was refronted in 1900, with this presumably referring to the C20 3-light chamfered mullion windows and not to the rebuilding of the front elevation itself, which looks like the original masonry. 

 

Gould Cottage

 

Along with the late C17 Woodlands, which adjoins its west end and is sparsely fenestrated on its front elevation, it is Grade II Listed for its group value only and this may reflect alterations that have been undertaken to the fabric or its interior. 

 

Woodlands

 

The last building on my Photo Challenge was The Cottage, which lies directly opposite Woodlands and is another modest house dated to the late C17, with gritstone and blue tiles used for the walls and roof respectively, but is also listed only for group value.

 

The Cottage

 

Since arriving in Birchover at 11.42, it had taken me 3 hours to have a quick look at Rowtor Rocks, walk up Main Street in Birchover, briefly explore Stanton Moor and photograph the listed buildings in Stanton in Peak and I hadn’t yet stopped for lunch. 

 

The Flying Childers

 

The next No. 172 bus back to Bakewell wasn’t until 16:32, which was too late in the day, but the bus to Darley Dale was due at 15:10 and I therefore decided to catch the latter and, to fill in the time, I would have a pint at the Flying Childers. 

 

The inscribed initials of William Pole Thornhill

Along with a couple who arrived at the same time as me, I was very disappointed to find that it was closed. After taking a couple of general record photos, I noted that the initials WTP were inscribed into the lintels above the entrance and other doors of the building, which are those of William Pole Thornhill, who paid for very many of the houses in the village to be built. 

 

Holly House

When planning my day out, I had made contingencies if my arrival in Stanton in Peak did not coincide closely with the times of the buses and after taking a couple of photos of the Grade II* Listed Holly House, where some of the windows have been blocked up to avoid the window tax, I went in search for the public footpath that would take me to the A6, which involved a walk of 1.5 km as the crow flies.

 

The name plaque at Holly House

 

Stanton in Peak - Part 1

 

The Thornhill family crest at Holy Trinity church

Entering Stanton in Peak, having previous walked from Rowtor Rocks up Main Street in Birchover before having a brief exploration of the geology and archaeology of Stanton Moor, I took a short diversion off Lees Road to get a view down to Shining Bank Quarry in the mid distance. 

 

A view to Shining Bank Quarry

My walk had started at the south-west end of the outlier of Ashover Grit that underlies Stanton Moor and I had ascended from 230 m at the top of The Mires to a maximum of 320 m when crossing the heather covered moorland, before dropping down to 276 m at my viewpoint, which is underlain by siltstones and shales of the Marsden Formation. 

 

The topography around Stanton in Peak

From here to the confluence of the Ivy Bar Brook with the River Lathkilll, the geology changes to the older mudstones of the Bowland Shale Formation, which is itself underlain by firstly the Lower Carboniferous Widmerpool Formation and then the Eyam Limestone Formation at an elevation of 123 m – all of which are partly covered by glacial tll laid down during the Pleistocene Epoch. 

 

The geology around Stanton in Peak

Continuing down Lees Road, which here is very steep, I looked for the first of 19 buildings, gatepiers, boundary walls and railings that were part of the British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge that I had prepared for Stanton in Peak. 

 

The Photo Challenge for Stanton in Peak

 

The Grade II Listed Wesleyan Reform Chapel (1829) and attached railings was easy to spot, with its tall round arched windows and oval plaque with its name and date inscribed into it. It is built with well coursed and squared buff/pink coloured locally quarried gritstone with a tooled finish in a herringbone pattern and a plain tile roof. 

 

The Wesleyan Reform Chapel

The Thornhill family based at Stanton Hall was responsible for building most of the houses in the village, which largely date from the C17 and C18 and, with the exception of small areas of C20 infill development that have been excluded from the Conservation Area, it remains essentially the same as shown on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map. 

 

The 1898 Ordnance Survey map of Stanton in Peak

Continuing past the junction with Birchover Road/Main Road, I photographed a few of the houses that are marked on this map and which form a tight-knit group on the north side of Main Road to the east of Stanton Hall. 

 

Houses on Lees Road and Main Road

The next building on my list was the Grade II Listed early C18 Woodside, which is again built with squared and coursed buff/pink Ashover Grit, with more massive quoins and dressings and plain tiles replacing the original stone slates on the roof. 

 

Woodside

 

Further down Main Road, more C18 houses are crammed into a fairly limited space, with some of these set parallel to the road and others at right angles. Amongst these is the late C18 Swallow’s Hole, a cottage that was previously Grade II Listed but was subsequently removed from the National Heritage List in 2020. 

 

Houses on Main Road

 

Carrying on down the hill is Yew Tree Cottage (1759), a Grade II Listed house that has dense hedges growing behind its garden walls and it was only possible to get glimpses of it. The gable end is largely covered in ivy, but from what I could see, it has gritstone walls and a plain tile roof. 

 

Views of Yew Tree Cottage

 

Crossing over the road, the gatepiers at the roadside entrance to the Grade II* Listed Stanton Hall, which dates back to at least the early C18, was the nearest I got to this seat of the Thornhill family, but I was able to see another pair of gatepiers at the end of the drive. 

 

Gatepiers at Stanton Hall

Opposite the churchyard is the Grade II Listed late C18 Church View, which I had somehow omitted from the list of buildings on my Photo Challenge but it was included in a general view down Main Road. It provides a further example of the locally quarried Ashover Grit and it has retained its original stone slate roof. 

 

Church View

 

Holy Trinity church (1838) was not part of my Photo Challenge, as someone had already photographed it, but I popped into the churchyard mainly to take photographs of the rear elevation of Ivy House. This Early English Gothic style church wasn’t open but I had a very quick look at its exterior, where the most interesting feature that I noted was the Thornhill family crest above the west door of the tower. 

 

 

Holy Trinity church

 

Leaving the churchyard, I immediately stopped at the unlisted war memorial (1926) to take a couple of photos of what the Imperial War Museum describes as a potent cross, before going to photograph several listed buildings on Park Lane and Middle Street.

 

The war memorial

Geology & Archaeology at Stanton Moor

 

The Cork Stone

Having had a quick look at Rowtor Rocks, it took me just over 20 minutes to walk from The Mires up Main Street to Barton Hill, where a handful of houses built with the local reddened variety of the Ashover Grit mark the eastern limit of the village of Birchover. 

 

Views of the premises of Birchover Stone Ltd.

 

Continuing up Barton Hill to the junction where it splits into Lees Road and Birchover Road, I took the latter and the offices and production facilities of Birchover Stone Ltd. came into view. Firstly looking at the sculpted blocks in the car park on the opposite side of the road, I went to the reception to ask about the variation in the Ashover Grit at their quarry and others on Stanton Moor. 

 

A Google Map view of Birchover quarry

 

I explained that a supplier of Peak Moor stone, from one of the two quarries still operating at the northern end of Stanton Moor, had wanted to charge me for samples, which was unprecedented in my experience of obtaining very many samples from all over the UK – very many of which are part of the Triton Stone Library that will very shortly be on public display at Sheffield Hallam University. 

 

Birchover stone when dry and wet

 

They offered to provide me with samples there and then, but I still had some distance to walk and I really didn’t want to be carrying them in my rucksack and they agreed to post them to me and I continued along Birchover Road, where I collected a piece of the Ashover Grit from an old waste tip next to the boundary wall. 

 

A specimen of the pink variety of the Ashover Grit

The specimen is medium to coarse grained with a pink tinge that is well developed on a weathered surface, with the mineralogy being predominantly quartz, feldspar that has partly broken down into kaolinite and other clay minerals and ferromagnesian minerals that have broken down to ferric oxide, which gives much of the gritstone on Stanton Moor its colour. 

 

An information board at Stanton Moor

Continuing for a couple of hundred of metres, I found the path to the Cork Stone, where a shabby and faded information board highlights the Bronze Age burial, ceremonial and settlement remains on Stanton Moor, a Scheduled Monument that also includes mediaeval and later land use. 

 

A specimen from the path to the Cork Stone

Along the path, the Ashover Grit outcrops in several places and, although I did not bring my Estwing hammer with me, I managed to obtain another specimen that is much coarser grained than the one mentioned above and is buff in colour except on its very weathered surface, were the ferromagnesian minerals have been oxidised to produce an orange/brown colour. 

 

The Cork Stone

 

I first visited Stanton Moor back in 1995, when assessing the geotourism value of the RIGS (Regionally Important Geological Sites) in the Peak District National Park. Looking at my Excel spreadsheet that records the 19 photographs that I took using colour transparency film, I took particular note of the Cork Stone and the mining bees that were nesting in the relatively soft horizontal beds that form the lower part of this. 

 

A detail of plane bedded gritstone at the Cork Stone

 

The disused New Park Quarry is immediately adjacent to the Cork Stone and I just took a few photographs to produce a panoramic view of the old quarry faces, without going down into the quarry to take a close look at the massive beds of the Ashover Grit. 

 

A panoramic view of New Park Quarry

Although I was very aware that very many ancient sites can be found on the heather covered moor, I only had limited time to explore Stanton Moor and I set off along the western public footpath, which passed several other old quarries that were mainly worked on a large scale during the C19. 

 

The quarries around Stanton Moor (2005)

 

On this occasion, I didn’t notice any mining bees in the Cork Stone but, all along the path, there were recently excavated entrances to their nests in the coarse sandy soil that showed they were active at this time of year. 

 

Entrances to the nests of mining bees along the public footpath

 

I didn't make any effort to see if I could gain access to any of the old quarries that I passed, which are thickly overgrown with trees, shrubs and heather and probably don’t reveal anything of geological interest that could be more easily seen at the New Park Quarry. 

 

An old quarry

 

Continuing along the path, without seeing any archaeological remains, I eventually came to the Bronze Age Nine Ladies stone circle, which has been traditionally been considered to represent nine ladies who were turned to stone, as a punishment for dancing on the Sabbath. 

 

The Nine Ladies stone circle

Although Stanton Moor is owned by the Thornhill Settlement, this site is in the care of English Heritage, which has produced an information board that shows the whereabouts of various stone circles, barrows, cairns and standing stones on what they describe as the Stanton Moor cairnfield.

 

A detail of the English Heritage information board

 

It is very unlikely that I will travel to Stanton Moor by myself again, as my day out required 7 separate bus journeys, but when researching this Language of Stone Blog post, I discovered that there are other natural tor like features here and this reinforced my idea that it might be a good location for a Sheffield U3A Geology Group field trip. 

 

The Reform Tower

 

When planning my day out, I had noticed that the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map marked a Tower on the eastern edge of the moor and I next went to investigate what I discovered to be the Grade II Listed Reform Tower, built by William Pole Thornhill in 1832 to commemorate the Reform Act in honour of the Prime Minister Earl Charles Grey. 

 

A panoramic view of the Ashover Grit escarpment

I just took a couple of photos of the tower and the exposure of Ashover Grit that it is built on and then retraced my steps along the public footpath and continued towards Lees Road, where I stopped briefly to take in the view north-east towards the main escarpment of the Ashover Grit beyond the village of Northwood. 

 

The Dale View Quarry

 

Leaving the public footpath at Lees Road, I could just get a glimpse of the Dale View Quarry that is operated by Marshalls and, when I included its stone in the Triton Stone Library back in 1996, it was marketed under the name Stanton Moor Pilough. 

 

The Triton Stone Library

 

Arriving at the village of Stanton in Peak, before starting the British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge that I had prepared, I stopped very briefly to take in view of the landscape beyond the village, where I recognised the Shining Bank Quarry, where I recorded the glacial till above the Eyam Limestone Formation when I visited it in 1995.

A view of Shining Bank Quarry