Roofers in Hoyland

The roofs of Hoyland

Hoyland is Old Norse for land on a hill spur, and the town earned an unusual claim to fame from the fields below that hill. The writer Barry Hines, son and grandson of miners, was born on 30 June 1939 in Hoyland Common, part of the same built-up area as the rest of the town, and spent his boyhood trapping and training kestrels on the pit-tips and fields around it. That childhood became A Kestrel for a Knave, his 1968 novel, which he helped Ken Loach adapt into the 1969 film Kes. A statue project to honour Hines has since been proposed in Barnsley.

Above the town centre stands a stranger landmark: Hoyland Lowe Stand, an 18th-century folly built around 1750 for Thomas Watson-Wentworth, the 1st Marquess of Rockingham, most likely as a hunting lodge. It is Grade II listed and has stood derelict for years; the council handed the deeds to a volunteer group, now the Lowe Stand Trust, in 2008. It is a reminder that this whole area answered to the Wentworth Woodhouse estate long before it answered to a colliery company, and nowhere shows that better than Elsecar, part of the same 1894 urban district as Hoyland itself. Elsecar New Colliery and Elsecar Ironworks both opened in 1795, and the terraces around them, Old Row's fifteen sandstone cottages among the oldest, Reform Row from 1837, were not organic colliery growth but housing built by the Earls Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse to a plan, for their own workforce.

That planned estate history is still visible on the roofs. Elsecar keeps genuine stone slate on its oldest cottages, Welsh slate arriving later on the same streets, sometimes on the building next door to a stone-slate original. Around the wider town, St Peter's Church of 1830 and the 1893 Princess Theatre sit among ordinary Victorian terraces and the inter-war and post-war estates that filled in Hoyland Common, Platts Common and Tankersley as the collieries here kept working into the twentieth century. It is a hillside patch too, so ridges, ties and lead flashings on the higher streets take more wind than the valley towns below.