UPDATE ON A COUPLE OF ITEMS


Hi to the chap from the Worsborough area - who write an interesting bit about Lowe Reservoir, River Dove etc. Thank for sharing your information.

I am sorry but I cannot find a way to reply to you anonymously. SO - if you contact me again [and I hereby encourage you to do that] please make clear if I have permission to publish / share with readers of this blog, your comment.

What I term the 'River Dove', is sometimes referred to as the House Carr Dyke [Huskar] / Stream, however S.P. Sykes in his seminal work / thesis 'In the shadow of the hill' [that being the prominent hill at Stainborough known as 'Stainborough Lowe'] - available from Barnsley Archives and Dodworth Library] - he calls the stream / dyke "...the embryo River Dove...". Other sources use the same term[s].

It is definitely not the Baggerwood Dyke, but that water-course does join it at the following map reference 53.531231, -1.524181, available on Google Maps at on https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5330425,-1.522872,15z.

I have recently read somewhere that it is not called the River Dove until it leaves Worsborough Reservoir.

However - it is CURRENTLY joined just before it enters Worsborough Reservoir - by the stream that you mention coming from Rockley at map reference: 53.527686, -1.487960   On Google Maps  https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5256192,-1.4948053,15z  .

I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the naming process - which probably occurred before Worsborough Reservoir was built - I think about 1802. So I think that it is the River Dove - historically.

The reservoir at Stainborough was not built to serve the canal, but a long time before it, at least initally. In the work mentioned by Sykes elsewhere on this post, it says that it was one of two dams built on that water-course, and that it was probably the original 'Smithy Dam' serving a smithy at the bottom of Smith Wood Lane which is nearby.

Documents in the 'Wentworth Papers' say that the Smithy Dam was demolished and replaced by the one holding back Lowe Lake / Stainborough Lake, about 1730 by William Wentworth. Some decades later the Wentworth's sunk the Strafford Colliery nearby.

Around that time the canals were not competing very well with the up-coming railways of the day, so the Dearne and Dove Canal Company widened and deepened the canals in a bid to compete. For that they needed more water. By then the Wentworth's had ceased use of that valley as a part of their landscaping, possibly because of the presence of the mine and its associated industrial complex, and about then they sunk the Strafford mine even deeper.

So to provide more water the Lowe Lake / Stainborough Reservoir was considerably enlarged, I think to make it 23 acres in size and 34 feet deep, by widening the basin up stream of the lake.

Some time after that the water of the dam leaked into the mine workings, so the reservoir was drained and the site of the lake and the dam abandoned. Probably because the mine was more valuable than the lake. The mine was subsequently dried out and continued to operate until pre-WW2.



Hello also - to the person signed 'anonymous' who commented on the 'tunnel from Stainborough / Wentworth Castle to Saville Hall. Thank for sharing your information. Please contact me to say if I can publish it / share it with others on this blog.

The engineering challenges involved in building such a tunnel, especially centuries ago, are / would have been immense - and around these parts we have lots of people who know about tunneling, as they did much of it making coal mines.

The current Saville Hall - as I understand it - is just one wing of a much larger building, the other wing having been demolished many years ago. I suggest that when it was complete it probably had a shared cellar, and it is that which was / is blocked off by the concrete slab. However - perhaps you could check if it really is 'concrete' and say how old it appears to be. I would have expected any opening in antiquity to have been sealed off by stone or brick. Incidentally the book / thesis referred to above has things to say about Saville Hall, and about the Saville family.

The tunnel notion is firmly in people's minds - but you are the first one to say anything about the Saville Hall end of it.

It's an idea that bears continuing consideration. Other places have similar stories e.g. Nabbs Hall to Silkstone Church; Sheffield Castle to somewhere I cannot recall now.


The Editor