Red Sandstone in St. Helen's Church II

 

Reddened sandstone in the tower at St. Helen's church

In my last Language of Stone Blog post, I briefly described the red sandstone used in the fabric of St. Helen's church in Burghwallis and the supposition that this incorporates stone from the granary at the Roman Templeborough fort in Rotherham, which was built with the locally distinctive Rotherham Red variety of the Mexborough Rock. 

 

The route of the Roman road to the east of Burghwallis parish

 

Stone is a heavy material and with the logistics of moving it using packhorses, horse/ox drawn carts and sledges being very difficult – even if the existing military roads were still usable after more than 500 years since the Romans withdrew from Britain - and I would like to see the evidence for this, especially since this would have involved the transport of the stone over a distance of more than 30 km. 

 

The Doncaster Geodiversity Assessment

 

The source of a red sandstone near Burghwallis is not obvious and when undertaking the Doncaster Geodiversity Assessment (DGA) back in 2007, I surveyed only three exposures of sandstone - Mexborough Rock in the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation (PMCMF), at Denaby Lane and Doncaster Road, and Ackworth Rock in the Pennine Upper Coal Measures Formation (PUCMF) at Harlington Railway Cutting - all of which are light brown in colour.

 

Locations of reddened sandstone identified in the DGA

Apart from Triassic sandstone from the Sherwood Sandstone Group, which underlies most of the eastern part of the borough but does not provide building stone, the only reddened strata that I saw was in the generally yellowish Dalton Rock at Barnburgh Cliff and Cadeby Waste Water Works an isolated block of red sandstone protuding from the ground at Hooton Pagnell and red/purplish sandstone at Hazel Lane Quarry – all of which are immediately below the Carboniferous/Permian unconformity. 

 

Views of reddened PUCMF sandstones

 

For my survey work in the western part of Doncaster, I essentially relied on the 1:50,000 scale Barnsley (Sheet 87) map and the accompanying Barnsley memoir (1947). The information provided by these is actually very limited, with so many of the quarries, railway and road cuttings and miscellaneous exposures having since been infilled, overgrown, developed or in private ownership and therefore inaccessible to the general public. 

 

My geological map of the Barnsley district

 

The descriptions of the Permian strata include details of many sites, without providing grid references, which are still often identifiable when out in the field, but the descriptions of the Coal Measures are much more general and, although there are mentions of reddened sandstones, no precise details of their locations are provided. 

 

My geological memoir for the Barnsley district

 

At St. James' church in High Melton, the chancel and the nave, which the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland suggests may be a survivor of the original Saxon church, contains a considerable amount of reddened and mottled red/yellow sandstone in the rubble walling, which is mixed in with dolomitic limestone from the Cadeby Formation. 

 

The chancel and nave at St. James' church

 

The Barnsley memoir states that "Near Melton Warren, 1,200 yds, N.W. of High Melton, the Dalton Rock is situated immediately below the Lower Magnesian Limestone with which it combines to form a fine escarpment. The rock is often stained red". 

 

A detail of the walling of the nave at St. James' church

 

On the strength of this and the appearance of a quarry on the 1854 Ordnance Survey map to the south of Bath Ponds, which the 2008 edition of sheet 87 marks as being underlain by the Dalton Rock, shows that this formation has been worked for building stone and I have therefore assumed that the sandstone for St. James' church was obtained locally – although I am not implying that the Bath Ponds quarry was the source of the stone.

 

My geological memoir for the Sheffield district

 

The PUCMF sandstones above the Ackworth Rock are actually very variable and poorly exposed and the relationships between the beds marked on the Sheffield (Sheet 100), Barnsley and Wakefield (Sheet 78) maps and described in the were not particularly well understood and partial resurveys, which have been undertaken periodically over the years, have resulted in certain named sandstones being assigned to another formation. 

 

The magazine at Pontefract Castle

This includes the Dalton Rock at Bath Ponds, which very confusingly is named on the GeoIndex Onshore online map viewer as the Newstead Rock (formerly the Pontefract Rock), a sandstone that has some reddening as seen in the Pontefract Castle magazine. 

 

The description of the "unproved south-eastern area"

 

The Wakefield memoir (1940), in its brief description of "The unproved south-eastern area" of the PUCMF that occurs beneath the Cadeby Formation to the north-west of Burghwallis, describes quarries at Badsworth as exposing up to 30 feet of thick-bedded yellow sandstone, often considerably red-stained". 

 

The geological map of the Wakefield district

 

My experience of the geology and building stones of the Wakefield district is quite limited and I have never explored the area where the bedrock geology is composed of the PUCMF; however, Google Street View is a very useful tool that I have used to explore the old part of Badsworth around Main Street and, although I can detect some reddening in the local sandstone, there is nothing like the red sandstone at St. Helen's church to be seen. 

 

Main Street on Google Street View