St. Peter's Church in Thorpe Salvin

 

Details of the south door

At the end of a very quick exploration of some of the stone built architecture in Thorpe Salvin, I finished by having another look at the exterior of St. Peter’s church, which I had last visited in the summer of 2016.

A general view of St. Peter's church

The church is usually locked and this, together with its remote location and difficulty in getting there by bus, has prevented me from surveying it in any great depth. Although I was able to gain access during the Thorpe Salvin Garden Trail, there were so many visitors going in and out that I couldn't easily photograph the most interesting architectural details.

The porch

The most interesting part of the fabric is the C12 south door, protected by an ungated Tudor porch, which is always available to view close up. Although the shafts of the colonnettes have been renewed quite recently, the Romanesque carvings to the arch and scalloped capitals – which have a zigzag pattern and foliate details respectively - are all well preserved.

The Romanesque south door

In the description in the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture of Britain and Ireland, the yellow colour of the dolomitic limestone used for the south door, compared to the paler colour of the rest of the external masonry, has been noted. I haven’t spent enough time looking at the masonry of the exterior to confirm this, but the stone used to restore the colonnettes lacks this yellow colouration.

A detail of the south door

A few metres to the south-east of the porch, there is a sundial of probable C18 date, which has been refixed to a plinth that has a date of 1841. It is also made from dolomitic limestone and there is a carved face on each side of it, but no gnomons remain.

Faces on the sundial

I had taken several photographs of the exterior of the church during my previous visit and, with no real reason to further examine its fabric, I just had a quick wander around the churchyard before leaving it by the entrance on Lady Field Road.

In the churchyard

Architecture in Thorpe Salvin

 

Thorpe Hall

 

When I last visited Thorpe Salvin back in 2016, I took advantage of the annual Thorpe Salvin Garden Trail to have a look inside St. Peter’s church, which was opened especially for the event, but I didn’t venture any further than the Coronation Garden.

 

A modern bugalow

Having walked up the path from the bridge at Top Triple Lock on the Chesterfield Canal, after visiting Hawks Wood quarry, I arrived on the Worksop Road at the east end of the village, where the first building that I saw was a modern bungalow, built in a cream/yellow limestone with a red pantile roof - a combination that can be seen along the length of the Magnesian Limestone.

 

A house on Worksop Road

The Thorpe Salvin Conservation Area contains virtually the entire village, apart from Common Road - where there are C20 houses of various ages - and this pattern of building materials is found in most of the houses, both old and modern, which can be seen all along Worksop Road.

 

An agricultural building on Worksop Road

Except for St. Peter's church, Thorpe Salvin Hall and 5-9 Little Wood Lane, which I haven’t seen, the only other listed buildings in the parish are the various locks, bridges and associated structures along the Chesterfield Canal.

 

A general view of Worksop Road

Most of the older buildings are simple vernacular houses of varying sizes, with no decorative features, and these are mixed with working agricultural buildings that are still part of a working farm or have been converted for residential use.

 

A house on Worksop Road

I didn’t stop to examine any of the buildings closely, but they are all built with blocks of massive stone with a bed thickness that is much greater than the limestone that I had seen earlier at the delph in Hawks Wood.

 

A house on Worksop Road

A local historian, who is familiar with the quarrying trade along the Chesterfield Canal, would no doubt be able to tell me more about the possible sources of the limestone used for all of the buildings in the village.

 

Modern architecture on Worksop Road

I only stopped to take a couple of snaps of the new houses on Worksop Road, and I have to say that I like them much better than the various modern houses that I had seen a week earlier along Lindrick Dale.

 

Thorpe Salvin Hall

Carrying on down Harthill Road to the junction with Lady Field Road, I went to look at the ruins of Thorpe Salvin Hall, a fine example of the work of Robert Smythson – the master mason/architect who also designed Wollaton Hall, Hardwick Hall and the 'Little Castle' at Bolsover Castle.

 

Thorpe Salvin Hall

This very fine example of Elizabethan architecture is in private ownership and I have never got close enough to take a good look at its stonework. Looking from afar, the bulk of it comprises roughly squared and coursed dolomitic limestone, with the better quality limestone used for its windows having a slight pink colour, but I couldn’t see the details of the dressings.

 

The gatehouse at Thorpe Salvin Hall

 

In the gatehouse, limestone is again used for basic walling, with “Rotherham Red” sandstone for the quoins and dressings. The latter has all the colour variations and physical characteristics of this variety of the Mexborough Rock, including its tendency to weather with pronounced cavernous decay. The stone probably came from Harthill, a small village 3 km to the west, which once had a thriving quarrying industry. 

 

A view along Lady Field Road

Walking back to Lady Field Road, I headed back to Harthill Road and along to the main entrance to St. Peter’s church, after passing an outcrop of very thinly bedded limestone in the roadside, which has the churchyard wall built directly on top of it.

 

The churchyard wall and a rock outcrop on Harthill Road

From Hawks Wood to Thorpe Salvin

 

Thinly bedded dolomitic limestone in Hawks Wood

Entering Hawks Wood, following my walk along the Chesterfield Canal from Kiveton Park station, I took an unmarked path to the west and very soon encountered a shallow delph, where a section of thinly bedded limestone is exposed at its edge.

 

An old delph in Hawks Wood

In this area, the upper subdivision of the Cadeby Formation (Sprotbrough Member) outcrops at the surface, with this being characteristically massive and wedge bedded. It is very rarely described in any of my memoirs for Sheffield, Barnsley and Doncaster as being thinly bedded or flaggy and, along with other similar roadside outcrops in Thorpe Salvin, it is the only place where I have seen limestone of the Cadeby Formation looking like this.

 

An exposure of the Sprotbrough Member in Hawks Wood

To the north side of the path, adjacent to the canal, there is a larger and much deeper quarry, where the quarry face exposes massive, thickly bedded limestone that is typical of the Sprotbrough Member. I think that is the site now recorded as a RIGS (Regionally Important Geological Site), following an assessment of it by the Sheffield Area Geology Trust, but I didn’t make any attempt to find access to it on this occasion. 

 

Top Treble Lock

Returning to the Chesterfield Canal, I made my way along past Top Treble Lock and crossed Bridge 35 to Old Spring Wood, which appears on the 1854 Ordnance Survey map with Sand Holes and Sand Pit next to it.

 

An 1854 map of Hawks Wood and Old Spring Wood

These names would suggest that sand was dug from these places but, looking at the geological map, the underlying bedrock here is clearly shown as the Permian Edlington Formation and no superficial deposits are marked.

 

The geology around Old Spring Wood and Thorpe Salvin

Looking at a LIDAR map, it can be clearly seen that this area of land has been excavated, as have the Brick Yard to the west of the Chesterfield Canal - which here has two very marked right angle bends in its course - and the Hawks Wood limestone quarry.

 

A LIDAR image of Hawks Wood and Old Spring Wood

The calcareous mudstone of the Edlington Formation has undoubtedly been exploited for making bricks here – as it has in many other places in South Yorkshire and the East Midlands. I have seen only a handful of exposures of it in drainage ditches and old brick pits, where there has been marl and gypsum, but the Sheffield memoir mentions that it also contains sand near Thorpe Salvin.

 

The entrance to Old Spring Wood

I didn’t wander off the path to Thorpe Salvin to investigate the old workings in the wood here and, with the hope that I might be able to find some exposures of limestone in the steep sided valley that it has formed, I instead carried on in search of Pudding Dike.

 

A pond in Pudding Dike

Finding only a stagnant looking pond beside the sewage works and, with no obvious way to follow the Pudding Dike any further, I made my way up the hill towards Thorpe Salvin on the path that runs alongside the wood - stopping occasionally to take few photographs of the landscape to the east, where the Triassic Chester Formation sandstones form ridges on the skyline. 

 

Glaciofluvial pebbles in the ploughed soil

I noticed that the ploughed soil here contains many pebbles mixed in with the angular fragments of dolomitic limestone, with the single specimen that I collected looking like those that I had found a couple of weeks earlier at Brancliffe Grange, which have a glaciofluvial origin.

 

A general view east across the limestone to Worksop

Although it has not developed the form of a dreikanter and is not very smoothly polished, this sandstone pebble has distinct facets and rounded edges, which have been shaped in a periglacial environment. Compared to the pebbles retrieved from the drainage ditch, where the high iron content of the soil would be a source of staining, it is also very pale in colour .

 

Glavioflucial pebbles

From Handsworth to Hawks Wood

 

A retaining wall on the Chesterfield Canal

Entering Week 22 of the COVID-19 Pandemic, in August 2020, having had a very productive walk from Shireoaks to South Anston – via Brancliffe Grange, Lindrick Dale and Anston Stones Wood - my next investigation of the geology and historic architecture of South Yorkshire involved a circular walk from Kiveton Park station to Thorpe Salvin.

 

The geology around Thorpe Salvin

 

On this occasion, I took the X54 from Treeton to Handsworth, where I took a photo of the Jeffcock Memorial Water Trough and Drinking Fountain, with its grey granite from the Cornubian batholith in south-west England and pink Peterhead granite from Aberdeenshire in north-west Scotland.

 

The Jeffcock Memorial

Continuing down Handsworth Road to ALDI, where I bought some food and drink for the day, I then caught a 52 bus to Woodhouse railway station, where the rough walling at the back of the houses provides an example of stone that would have been brought from the nearest quarry.

 

A stone wall at Woodhouse railway station

Arriving at Kiveton Park station, I then set off eastwards on the towpath along the Chesterfield Canal, passing by the high retaining wall, built in pitch-faced limestone, and the various remnants of old buildings that once formed part of Albert’s Dock – the loading point for the Anston stone that was sent to London to build the Houses of Parliament.

The remains of various walls

Walking quickly along the canal, and passing the various outcrops of the Cadeby Formation and the old quarries here, I stopped only to photograph Thorpe Bridge  for the British Listed Buildings website, to which I have been a regular contributor, and a weathered milestone.

 

A milestone on the Chesterfield Canal

After my first walk along the Chesterfield Canal, while looking at old maps, I discovered that just before Pudding Dike Bridge, in Hawks Wood, there was an old quarry with lime kilns immediately adjacent to the canal and I therefore went to investigate.

 

Crossing Pudding Dike Bridge

Waiting for the Bus in Handsworth

Weathered stone at St. Mary's church

The exploration of the geology and historic buildings of rural South Yorkshire, without a car, involves some very careful planning at the best of times and, when visiting places like Laughton-en-le-Morthen and Thorpe Salvin – which are only a short distance from Treeton as the crow flies - this involves catching 3 buses each way.

A Google map of the area around Treeton

As I had discovered during the COVID-19 Pandemic, having exhausted the interesting places that I could reach on a single bus journey from Treeton, using the 73 and the X54, the X5 route from Dinnington to Sheffield proved to be particularly useful – especially on the return journeys.

 

The X5 bus route

For my walk from Shireoaks to South Anston, via the Chesterfield Canal, Lindrick Dale and Anston Stones Wood, I planned my route to end at the Leeds Arms, which was open at the time of my walk on 2nd August 2020 and conveniently has a bus stop immediately outside it.

 

A view from the top deck of the X5 bus

Having taken a few photos of the Turner Memorial Methodist Church and checked the various bus timetables on my phone while drinking my pint of Abbot Ale, I caught my bus and, rather than travelling all the way back to Sheffield – as I probably would do during normal times – I alighted in Handsworth, where I only had a few minutes to wait for the 73 bus.

 

The church of St. Mary the Virgin

 

The church of St. Mary the Virgin is just over the road from the bus stop and, although I had taken a good look at the interior during the Heritage Open Days festival a few years earlier, I had only taken a few general photos of the exterior and wanted to see its stonework again.

 

The chancel at St. Mary's church

I have encountered numerous older houses in and around Handsworth, where the sandstone  generally has a very distinctive ‘ginger nut’ hue on the surface, with a blue/grey colour to the body of the stone; however, my recollection of the oldest visible masonry at St. Mary’s church, in the chancel, was that it had quite a different character.

 

The steeple of St. Mary's church

Since 1825, when the upper stages of the late C12 tower were rebuilt, the north aisle was added in 1833, the south aisle, porch and vestry in 1904 and the choir vestry in 1930. Furthermore, there have been three phases of restoration - in 1869, 1880 and 1934 – and at some stage the lower stages have been rendered and/or covered in a thick paint like coating, as I have seen before at St. Andrew’s church in Bolton upon Dearne.

 

Rendered/painted masonry to the west door

With very limited time available, I only had time to look at the south porch, which is built of fine grained laminated sandstone, with the occasional block having cross-laminated ripples. Its ‘ginger nut and blue/grey colouration is consistent with the local stone that I have always assumed to be from the large Handsworth Quarries, where it was marketed as Blue Stone.

 

Masonry at the south porch

Where subjected to rising damp, the sandstone blocks have weathered to expose the blue/grey body, with differential weathering highlighting the high silt content – a feature of the finer grained strata in the Pennine Middle Coal Measures Formation, which I had seen as large isolated blocks at the nearby Advanced Manufacturing Park and Waverley Estate.

 

Masonry affected by rising damp

Having never had the opportunity to see any rock faces in the Handsworth Quarries, which have been redeveloped as a housing estate, I can’t comment on the presence of any orange colouration in the unweathered rock and I would therefore be very interested to see some fresh exposures.

 

Cross-laminated ripples