Roofers in Conisbrough

The roofs of Conisbrough

Conisbrough is built around a hilltop and a spur: the castle on one, the church on the other, both Grade I listed and both, Doncaster Council's own conservation area appraisal says, sitting above a town traditionally built in "limestone rubble brought to course" under "natural Welsh slate roofs". The castle's 12th-century keep, a four-storey Magnesian limestone cylinder with six wedge-shaped buttresses, is famous twice over: English Heritage, who have run it since 2008, re-roofed and re-floored it in the 1990s with European Union funding, and Walter Scott used it, fictionalised as "Coningsburgh Castle", as the setting for his 1819 novel Ivanhoe. St Peter's Church nearby is reckoned to be the oldest building in South Yorkshire, with an Anglo-Saxon core from around the 8th century.

Below that heritage core, two separate industries built the rest of the town, and neither repeats anywhere else on our patch. George Kilner opened the Conisbrough branch of his family's glass-bottle works in 1864, on an 11-acre riverside site with its own wharf; at its peak it employed up to 400 people and housed them in 76 company cottages, and it is the works that put the Kilner jar, still sold today, into the world's kitchens, before the firm went bankrupt in 1937. Denaby Main, now counted as part of Conisbrough, grew the opposite way: two shafts sunk in 1863 for the Denaby Main Colliery Company reached the Barnsley bed in 1867, and the company built over a thousand houses for its workforce with no overall plan at all, so the village sprawled "haphazardly in fits and starts" for thirty years.

The Conanby estate, built just north of Old Road between 1923 and 1926 for the families of Denaby's miners, was the more considered answer: around 400 houses, unusually fitted with warm water from a central boiler house powered at first by Cadeby Main Colliery's own electricity supply. Conisbrough's conservation area itself was designated in 1974, with its most recent boundary review approved in October 2022, so the limestone-and-slate core the council protects and the brick colliery and glassworks streets around it are, by design, treated differently on any roof we touch.