Roofers in Bawtry

The roofs of Bawtry

Bawtry is the one town on our South Yorkshire patch that was never built for coal. A wharf settlement here in the Danelaw era grew into a planned new town around 1200, and by the 14th century its river port on the Idle was exporting wool overseas. What survives today is mostly the town's second life, as a Georgian coaching stop on the Great North Road between Doncaster and Retford: the White Hart, dated 1689, and the mid-to-late-18th-century Crown Hotel, nine rendered bays under a dentilled parapet with a rear verandah on cast-iron columns, both still standing on the High Street, alongside the red-brick Georgian terraces of South Parade with their modillion cornices and keystoned windows. Across the town's 44 listed buildings, one Grade I, one Grade II* and 42 Grade II, Welsh slate covers the grandest Georgian fronts and clay pantile the more ordinary ones.

Bawtry also has a real, if modest, claim on the Pilgrim Fathers story. It was never the embarkation point itself, that was Immingham, on the Humber, in 1608, but it was the market town nearest to where the movement's founders actually lived: William Bradford, described as the Pilgrims' leader, came from Austerfield, about a mile away, and William Brewster held the Separatist congregation's meetings at Scrooby Manor, also close by. Bawtry itself was home to George Morton, a Pilgrim Father in his own right and the publisher of Mourt's Relation, one of the first accounts of the Plymouth colony to reach print.

None of that is a large town by the standards of the rest of this site, which is exactly the point: Bawtry's roofing job is Georgian inns, terraces and the ordinary brick streets around them, not colliery rows or council estates, and it is worth knowing which of the two materials, slate or pantile, belongs on which building before a repair starts.