A Day Out to Wortley - Part 2

 

A view of Reading Room Lane

Continuing my day out to Wortley, I retraced my steps along the Halifax Road and took a few photos of St. Leonard’s church, which was open for the Heritage Open Days festival and which I would visit after taking photos of some of the buildings at Wortley Hall for my British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge. 

 

A view of St. Leonard's church

 

According to the National Churches Trust, records indicate that there was a chapel in Wortley in the reign of Henry III and there is evidence that the church existed in 1318, but the church that is seen today consists of a tower (1754) by the Rotherham based sculptor and architect John Platt, but with the rest rebuilt c.1815 and later work in the C19. 

 

The Wortley Arms public house

 

The next building on my Photo Challenge was the Grade II Listed Wortley Arms public house, which Historic England date as mid C18. I just took a couple of photos of its north-west elevation and then turned to photograph the south side of the nave of the church, which shows the 3-light windows with Y-tracery and a reset C14 3-light window with reticulated tracery at the east end.

  

A view of the south nave of St. Leonard's church

 

Continuing along Sheffield Road for a short distance, my next building was the mid C18 Ivy Cottage, with a C19 addition, where dirt obscures the yellowish colour of the massive sandstone. This is again very probably Grenoside Sandstone, which produces very large blocks - as seen in the very large lintel above the central door and for its surrounds – with Greenmoor Rock probably used for the stone slate roof.

  

Ivy Cottage

Looking at the south-west and rear elevations of the Wortley Arms, where the stonework isn’t very dirty and the patina isn't well developed, the same yellowish Grenoside Sandstone is seen here, but the C19 rear wing is quite blackened and I couldn’t confirm that is again used for this. 

 

The rear of the Wortley Arms

 

Attached to the south-east end of the Wortley Arms is the Wortley Men’s Club and Institute, which was built as the Reading Room for Wortley Hall and its front elevation on Reading Room Lane has Mock Tudor style timbers attached to it. 

 

A view up Reading Room Lane to the Wortley Men's Club

 

This building and another row of terraces on the opposite side of Reading Room Lane, which has a similar pattern of Mock Tudor style timbers and were presumably built at the same time, appear on the 1855 Ordnance Survey (OS) map and, although they are not listed, their architectural style and the use of red plain tiles for the roof is very unusual. 

 

The terrace of houses opposite the Wortley Men's Club

 

I headed down Reading Room Lane to the next building on my Photo Challenge, the Old Vicarage (1880), but it is set in private grounds and is obscured by a large hedge and trees and the single photo that I took just shows its chimney stacks and its stone slate roof. 

 

A partial view of the Old Vicarage

 

Returning to the Wortley Arms car park, the dry stone walls are made with a flaggy sandstone that looks quite similar to that used for the boundary walls on Halifax Road. Stone for walling like this would usually be obtained very locally but, I can only see a couple of very small quarries on the 1855 OS map, which are some distance away, and the proximity of the quarries at Green Moor do not rule these out as being the source. 

 

A boundary wall at the Wortley Arms Car Park

Before going to have a quick look at Wortley Hall, I took a couple of photos of the village school, which was built some time between the publication of the 1855 and 1892 OS maps and is likely to have been built after the Forster’s Education Act in 1870, but it has now been converted to residential use.

 

The former school in Wortley