Like Darnall and Woodhouse, Chapeltown is a former village (not a town, despite its name) that has now become a suburb of Sheffield. It was originally a hamlet, but expanded considerably from the sixteenth century onwards when industrialisation reached the area, most notably in the form of Newton, Chambers & Company’s Thorncliffe Ironworks site. Sheffield is famous for being built on five rivers, each rich in industrial archaeology, which makes it easy to forget that its brooks and streams were also exploited as sources of water power, as we shall see on this walk.
Chapeltown Railway Station, opened in August 1984, a quarter of a mile along the railway track from the site of an earlier station that opened in 1897. The platforms and a station building from the original station can still be seen, although the current station is the usual two platform affair with the bare minimum of features. From the platform, we descend the steps to Lound Side and turn right, then walk to the roundabout and continue straight ahead along Burncross Road. Here, turn right in front of the Thorncliffe Arms (originally the Midland Hotel) and walk through the car park, bearing right at the end to return to Lound Side. Turn left and follow the road up the hill until you reach a pair of Grade II-listed churches on your left. The first of these is the Church of St. John the Baptist, which dates from 1860 and which was closed in 2000 due to structural problems. Happily, rather than being demolished, it has since been restored and converted into office space. The second church is Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, built in 1866 on the site of the original Mount Pleasant Chapel, which opened in 1906. This has also now been converted into office space and accommodation. Opposite the Church of St John the Baptist, on the other side of Lound Side, is the old Lound national School building, which dates from 1716 and is now offices.
Turn left past Mount Pleasant Methodist Church into Mount Pleasant, then turn left along a footpath behind the churches and follow it until it reaches a road, Housley Park. Cross straight over the road and continue along the path, which joins the end of Greenhead Lane. Follow this down the hill until it reaches Burncross Road, passing the former Freeman Hospital (also known as the Greenhead Almshouses and founded in 1837) on your right and Greenhead Wesleyan Reform Church on your left. Turn right and follow Burncross Road, then take a right turn into Housley Road, an example of the curious phenomenon of unadopted roads. These are roads that don’t have to be maintained by Highway Authority under the Highways Act 1980, with maintenance instead being a legal duty of the owners of the road. In practice, this is usually the owners of the houses that line them, and one imagines there is much wrangling over how to split the costs as well as blatant attempts to avoid them altogether, which probably explains why Housley Road is riddled with massive potholes!
Housley Hall.
Look out for a path between houses on your left, which we will follow in a moment. First however, continue up Housley Road for a short distance to view Housley Hall, a historic house with a seventeenth century façade built around a fifteenth century core tucked away down this quiet side-street. Backtrack to the path and follow it to Smith Carr Avenue, then cross straight over into Smith Carr Close, and follow another path running across the top of Burncross Cemetery. On reaching a gate, turn left and walk down the hill through the cemetery, passing between an attractive pair of well-maintained cemetery chapels to return to Burncross Road. Turn right and stay on Burncross Road, looking out for a nineteenth century milepost on the corner of Burncross Drive. The next section of the walk takes us past a handful of public houses, beginning with passing the Wharncliffe Arms and then the Crown & Cushion public house on your left. After passing the second pub, we arrive at a crossroads where, on the right, the Acorn Inn can be seen. This was built in the late 1850s, although there has been a public house on the site since at least the 1820s. Turn right past the pub, and follow Hollow Gate, whereupon the Bridge Inn – which dates from at least 1881 – appears on your right. Just past this inn, turn right along a footpath to follow Charlton Brook.
Charlton Brook Dam.
Charlton Brook runs into Blackburn Brook in the centre of Chapeltown, and this in turn runs into the Don. Whilst a small number of books and websites documents the many waterwheel sites that line Sheffield’s five principle rivers, both brooks number amongst the aforementioned Sheffield streams that also provided waterpower to early industry, but which are less well known, even locally. Thus, as we follow the path next to the brook, we soon reach Charlton Brook Dam, which was constructed in 1870 by Newton Chambers to supply water to Thorncliffe Ironworks. Nowadays, it forms the nucleus of a charming open public space sandwiched between areas of housing, and has fishing platforms and an abundance of waterfowl. As we continue past the pond, the path eventually ends at School Road, where we turn right and walk to Lane End. Here, cross the road, turn right and then turn left down Bridge Inn Road. At the end of the road, carry straight on down a track (forming part of the Trans Pennine Trail and signposted as such) and then turn right to reach Thorncliffe Pond, another legacy of Sheffield’s water-powered past. The pond is fed from Charlton Brook and is believed to have been constructed to store water for a waterwheel at the Chapel Furnace in the sixteenth century, where iron was manufactured that is alleged to have been used to make cannonballs for Oliver Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War. The furnace and the pond later become part of Newton Chambers Ironworks and a pump house was built to take water from the pond for cooling the furnaces. Nowadays, it has become a haven for wildlife. Turn right and follow a path past the pond, through the woods, until it reaches a T-junction, then turn left and cross the bridge over the railway line. On the far side of the bridge, the path turns right on the far side to reach Arundel Road, where we turn left and follow this to Station Road. Here, the surviving building from the original Chapeltown Railway Station can be seen on the opposite corner, from where a path leads to the present one.
We aren’t quite ready to return to the station yet however, so instead turn left and follow Station Road, which eventually becomes White Lane. Continue past the junction with Coppice Rise on your right to view the old Chapeltown Central Railway Station in the woods to the left. Now disused, this opened in 1854 on the South Yorkshire Railway’s Blackburn Valley line and closed in 1954, before being converted into a wonderfully idiosyncratic private house. After viewing the station, turn into Coppice Rise and follow it to the end, where it becomes a path, and follow this through the woods to reach Chapeltown Park, which was opened in 1920. Walk through the park, passing the bandstand and war memorial, then exit the park on Cowley Lane. Turn right and follow the road past a memorial garden to a roundabout, which was once Chapeltown Crossroads. Turn right along Station Road; on the corner is the Wagon & Horses public house, which was rebuilt on the site of an earlier pub at some point prior to the nineteen fifties. Continue past the a former HSBC bank building, the Coach and Horses public house and the former Picture Palace cinema. The Picture Palace opened in 1912 and closed in 1963, whereupon – like one of the former cinemas we saw in Goldthorpe – it became a bingo club, before eventually being used as a snooker club, which it still is today. Finally, then turn left along a path next to the bank and follow it to the supermarket car park, then walk straight ahead across this to return to the station.
Having completed our walk around Chapeltown, we now leave Sheffield behind and head north to our next stop, which is at a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley…
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