Roofers in Rawmarsh

The roofs of Rawmarsh

Rawmarsh's own name describes the ground it stands on. Recorded as "Rodemesc" in the Domesday Book and "Raumersche" by 1355, it combines the Old Norse "rode" (red) with the Old English "mersc" (marsh), a direct reference to the Permian red sandstones and marls that run through the area, the same rock that gave later builders their walling stone. Coal has been worked at Haugh since the mid-fifteenth century and at Parkgate from around 1700 under Earl Fitzwilliam's ownership, and Parkgate itself grew as streets of terraced housing built for that workforce.

What sets Rawmarsh apart from every other former colliery or ironworks town on this site is that its steel industry never actually stopped. The Park Gate Iron and Steel Company's blast furnaces and Siemens open hearth furnaces closed in the late 1970s, but production carries on today at Aldwarke's "New Site", built in the early 1960s with Kaldo converters and electric melting capacity, alongside an 11-inch mill at Roundwood. This is a working steel town, not a memorial to one, and the roofing stock reflects a place that never went through the same wholesale post-industrial pause as its neighbours. Rawmarsh also ran its own tramway from 1907, operated by the Mexborough and Swinton Traction Company out to Mexborough, Conisbrough and Kilnhurst, converted to trolleybuses in 1929 and kept running until March 1961, a specific piece of transport history that does not repeat anywhere else on our patch.

The older, higher-status buildings show a single consistent roofing material. Hall Farmhouse (1736, pebbledashed sandstone with quoins), St Mary's Rectory (1752 to 1753, Grade II*), the early nineteenth-century pumping house and St Mary's Church itself, rebuilt in 1838 to a design by James Pigott Pritchett, are all recorded with a Welsh slate roof over sandstone walls. The church has stood on the same site since Norman times, around 1127, with the earliest recorded rector instituted in 1227, so the current 1838 building is only the latest of several on that spot.