Historic Houses of the Sheffield Moors: Halls, Lodges and a Folly
West of Sheffield, where the city gives out and the moors begin, the old houses stand on their own: stone farmhouses with their dates cut over the door, steel barons’ shooting lodges, a hall that an archbishop of York once owned, a tower that nobody quite knows the reason for, and a little Gothick house in a churchyard built to keep watch over the dead. Most of them are in the big moorland parish of Bradfield, and their names are as old as the houses, sometimes older. This is a guide to some of the historic houses of the Sheffield moors, what their names mean, and who lived in them.
Sugworth Hall
Sugworth Hall looks down on Bradfield Dale from the edge of the moor, and it is older than it looks. Archbishop Rotherham of York, who died in 1500, left “my tenement called Sugworth in the parish of Bradfield” in his will. The house on the site is next heard of in the will of Robert Hawksworth, who lived there in the 1560s; the Hawksworths were still there in the 1630s, and by the early 18th century it belonged to the Gould family. The listed building is a 17th-century farmhouse, heavily reworked in the 19th century, with a carved panel of a lion and crossed hatchets on its entrance front. The -worth in the name is an enclosure. For the first part, the Sheffield dialect collector Sidney Oldall Addy compared Sugden, “sow pasture”.
The hall’s most famous owner was Charles Boot (1874–1945), of the Sheffield builders Henry Boot & Sons, which built more houses than any other firm between the wars and went on to build Pinewood Studios. Boot gave Sugworth its tower and battlements, probably to designs by E. Vincent Harris, the architect of Sheffield City Hall. His first wife, Bertha, died in late 1926; he remarried in 1927, and in 1930 bought Thornbridge Hall in Derbyshire. The hall is Grade II listed.
Boot’s Folly
About 300 metres north of the hall, alone on the hillside between Bradfield and Strines, stands the tower everyone calls Boot’s Folly. Historic England lists it as Sugworth Tower: a four-storey square tower with a taller stair turret, built in 1927 with 17th-century stone from Lower Holes Farmhouse, and built “as a job-creation scheme”. That is the official reason. The local one is sadder: that Boot built it so he could see across the valley to High Bradfield churchyard, where Bertha was buried. A staircase once led up to a panelled room at the top. It was taken out, so the story goes, after a cow strayed up the stairs and had to be rescued with difficulty, and the tower stands empty.
Bents House
Below Sugworth, Bents House was the Boots’ other house in the dale, and Henry Matthew Boot lived there until 1974. Its name, shared with the old Bents Farm nearby, is probably the moor’s: bent is “thick, tough grass, with somewhat broad leaves”, as Addy put it. The estate agents who have sold it like to say that its stone and its panelling were salvaged from grander buildings; nobody has shown it.
Brogging and Stubbing
On Mortimer Road, the failed turnpike of the 1770s (see the Dark Peak road names guide), stand two farmhouses whose names describe the land. Broggin House is a listed farmhouse of squared gritstone with “GEW/1718” cut on its lintel. Addy recorded Brogging as a place in Bradfield, with Brogging Moss beside it, and guessed, with a question mark, at Old Icelandic brok, a bad, black grass, and eng, a meadow: the meadow of the black grass.
Stubbing is a word Addy found all over the Sheffield field names: Golden Stubbing and Harry Stubbing at Dore, Organ Stubbing at Crookes, Wolsh Stubbings at Ecclesall. A stubbing was ground where a wood had been felled and the stumps were left, “a grove which has been felled, as the word ‘stubbing’ imports”. The farm is the cleared land.
Thornseat Lodge
Higher up Mortimer Road is the ruin of Thornseat Lodge, built around 1855 as a shooting lodge for Sidney Jessop, of the Sheffield steelmakers William Jessop and Sons, on land bought from Joseph Hammerton of Walker House. Until the 20th century it was spelled Thornsett. It hosted the steel families’ shooting parties, was later let to the Bradfield Game Association, and in 1934 was sold to Sheffield Corporation. The council made it a children’s home, by 1973 for “16 emotionally disturbed or ‘difficult’ children”, and closed it in 1980. It was sold in 2004, and the roof has been falling in ever since, while plans to rescue it come and go.
Stanedge Lodge
Out on the Long Causeway, below Stanedge Pole, Stanedge Lodge is a 19th-century grouse-shooting lodge and the highest house in Sheffield. An Ordnance Survey map of about 1850 is said to show it as Lumley Lodge, and a 1982 magazine piece called it Lumley Hall, with a part dating from the 18th century, while admitting that its history was “somewhat patchy”. At one point it belonged to one of the Wilsons of Sharrow, the Sheffield snuff makers, a family that liked its grouse: one of them bought the Moscar shooting estate, and his wife said it was the only time she ever saw him excited. In 1982 the lodge was for sale for £50,000, still with no mains electricity.
Crawshaw Head
On Rod Side, near the Manchester Road at Hollow Meadows, Crawshaw Head is the crow wood’s head: crawe, a crow, and sceaga, a wood. According to the Sheffield history researchers who have pieced its story together, the house was built around 1855 by Dr William Lennard, and the estate, 167 acres in the hamlets of Moorwood and Ughill, was up for sale by 1868. For a couple of years in the late 1850s a farmer’s son from Nottinghamshire lived with the Lennards as companion and tutor to their son. His name was Henry Bradley, he later worked as a clerk for a Sheffield cutlery firm, and he ended up as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Bingley Seat and Griffs Cottage
Over at Stannington, Bingley Seat on Woodbank Road is a 17th-century farmhouse of thin-coursed sandstone, and its pair of doorways side by side shows it was once two dwellings knocked into one. Round the back is “an unusual circular light” in the wing. Addy notes simply that the surname Bingley “is found in South Yorkshire”.
Griffs Cottage, on Stopes Road, probably carries an old Stannington field name. Addy found “Grifts” as the name of several fields in Stannington, and John Harrison’s survey of 1637 has “the nether Grifts”, “the oaken Griffs” and a “Grifts lane”. What a griff was is less certain. Addy pointed to graft, to dig with a spade or cut trenches in grassland.
Ben Greave
Ben Greave, near Stacey Bank in the Loxley valley, ends in one of the commonest of the local name-endings. A greave, Addy says, is a grove, from the Old English gráfe; there were Greaves in Ecclesfield and Coneygreaves in Harrison’s survey. The “Ben” we couldn’t pin down. If you know, tell us.
A few more worth finding
Onesacre Hall, on the hill between Bradfield and Oughtibridge, is one of the finest houses in the parish, listed Grade II*: an ashlar house on a modified H-plan of two builds, around 1630–40 and 1660–70, with a great arched kitchen fireplace. Fair House Farmhouse at Low Bradfield is also Grade II*. And by High Bradfield churchyard stands the Watch House, a small two-storey Gothick house with pointed windows and a battlemented parapet. Local history says it was built in 1745 for watchers guarding fresh graves against the body snatchers; Historic England dates the building to the late 18th century. Either way, it was built to keep the dead where they were put.
From the Sheffield moors to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, keeps the old houses, and some of the old houses keep something else. Most of the historic residences of the Dark Peak are known to house boggarts, the squat, hairy household spirits that will do the chores for a saucer of milk and wreck the place if you cross them, and the bestiary names two: Crawshaw Head and Sugworth Hall. According to the first issue of Murk Lore, neither owner will discuss it for the record. The moors the houses stand on are in the Dark Peak geography guide, their names in the guide to Sheffield and Peak place names, and the steel money that built half of them in Sheffield steel. Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: Sugworth Hall from Wikipedia and its listing; Archbishop Rotherham’s will, Sugworth, Brogging, stubbing, bent grass, Bingley, the Grifts, graft and greave from Sidney Oldall Addy’s Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888); Charles Boot from Wikipedia; Boot’s Folly from its listing and Mike Higginbottom; Broggin House and Bingley Seat from their listings (Broggin, Bingley Seat); Thornseat Lodge from House and Heritage; Stanedge Lodge from Geograph, Yorkshire Pudding and Alan Crutch; Crawshaw Head from the Sheffield History forum, citing the Lennard family and the 1868 sale plan, its name from Wikipedia, and Henry Bradley from Wikipedia; Onesacre Hall and the Watch House from their listings (Onesacre, Watch House), and the Watch House’s 1745 date from Malcolm Nunn via Sheffield History; listed grades from the National Heritage List for England.
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