Roofers in Penistone

The roofs of Penistone

Penistone earned its living from cloth and sheep long before it became a railway town. First recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Pengeston, it was known for a rough home-spun cloth called Penistone cloth or forest white, traded regularly enough that a Cloth Hall was built for the merchants in 1768. A sheep fair has run here since before 1699, and the local strain of hill sheep eventually merged with a Derbyshire type to form the modern Whitefaced Woodland breed, still known in part by the town's name. St John the Baptist's church stands at around 820 feet above sea level, with Hartcliffe Tower nearby reaching 1,194 feet, seven miles up into the Pennines from Barnsley.

The railway arrived on 15 July 1845 and turned the market town into a junction, and its viaduct is the most dramatic thing in the parish. Completed in 1850 to John Hawkshaw's design, 29 arches on a 40-chain curve carrying the line 330 yards over the River Don, it is still there today because it was rebuilt. On 2 February 1916, at around 4.20pm, the second arch from the main road gave way under a locomotive whose crew had just enough warning to jump; the engine fell 85 feet into the Don below. The masonry had already been flagged as a problem and men were on site trying to fix it. The line reopened with the arch rebuilt to its original form within the year, and the Woodhead route over it was electrified in 1954, though passenger trains stopped using that line in 1970.

None of that changes the roofing, which follows the ground rather than the railway. Barnsley Council's own conservation area document, covering the historic core designated in January 1974, describes the local vernacular directly: building material predominantly sandstone, and roofing material tending to be stone slate. That is the every-street reality on the terraces around the market, health centre and library, with Welsh slate on the Victorian additions and concrete tile on the estates built since. Higher and further out, at Ingbirchworth and towards Langsett, the moor takes more wind and more frost than the town centre itself, and stone slate pegs and lead flashings both feel it first.