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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| A view of Shining Bank Quarry |
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