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| The topography around Old Whittington |
After a very slow start to 2025, with a recce of Burbage Valley and a brief visit to Christ Church in February and a brief exploration of The Crags in Conisbrough in March, April proved to be a busy month and started with a British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge at Old Whittington – a small village mentioned in Domesday Book as Witintune, which is set 4 km to the north of Chesterfield.
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| Whittington Moor war memorial |
Alighting from the X17 bus at the Whittington Moor Lidl stop, I made my way across Whittington Moor Roundabout to Station Road and immediately encountered Whittington Moor war memorial (1921), in the form of a wheel cross, which the Derbyshire Courier describes as being made from Derbyshire gritstone.
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| A detail of the gritstone used for Whittington Moor war memorial |
I didn’t closely examine the stone with my hand lens, but from the photos that I took, I can see that the roughly tooled sandstone is medium grained and it is very likely that this is Stancliffe Darley Dale stone from the Corbar Grit (Ashover Grit), which was used for many war memorials and Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones in the region.
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| Whittington Mill |
Continuing along Station Road, I stopped briefly at Whittington Mill, a flour mill that was powered by water from a mill pond that was fed by the River Whitting to the north, but which has been infilled and redeveloped with industrial units.
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| The River Whitting |
I didn’t get near enough to look at the sandstone used to build the mill, but from my photos I can see that it is generally light brown with a considerable proportion of the blocks having an orange/brown colouration. Looking at the 1883 Ordnance Survey map, quarries to the north of Sheepbridge, a few hundred metres to the west of Old Whittington, worked the Deep Hard Rock.
The first building on my Photo Challenge, the Grade II listed Manor House, has a central section that dates to the C16 or C17, with large mullioned windows, but a high garden wall, shrubs and trees obscures the ground floor of the east elevation.
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| The Manor House |
Briefly stopping to take in the view up Whittington Hill, where the marked change in the slope is formed by the underlying Deep Hard Rock, from the Manor House to the north side of Newbridge Lane, there is a change in elevation from 72 m to 94 m above sea level over a distance of 240 m.
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| Views up and down Whittington Hill |
Continuing up Whittington Hill to High Street, the geological map shows that I had passed over the younger Silkstone Rock and that I had actually been walking up the southern limb of the Brimington Anticline. This is related to the Dronfield Syncline and other folds in the Sheffield region – as described on pp. 148-151 of the geological memoir for the Sheffield district and illustrated in Plate VI.
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| Plate VI from the geological memoir for the Sheffield district |
I had encountered some of these when exploring Coal Aston, Dronfield, Ridgeway, Eckington and Mosborough, which are underlain by strata of the Pennine Lower Coal Measures Formation, and during a short 1.25 km walk from Sheffield Road to Church Street North – where the fold axis of the Brimington Anticline has an elevation of 98 m – I had learned something new about the structural geology of the region.
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| A view across High Street to Church Street North |
On my walk to date, except for Whittington Mill and the Manor House, I don’t recall seeing any other buildings that are built out of sandstone but, crossing over High Street and entering the Old Whittington Conservation Area, it is obvious that this is the dominant material here and I immediately went in search for the 18 listed buildings on my Photo Challenge.
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