Overview of Athersley Archaeology

Here is overview of known archaeological sites in and neighbouring Athersley and New Lodge.

Athersley and New Lodge Desk-Based Assessment

The area of Athersley, New Lodge and Smithies has only a small number of known archaeological features. The only sites situated in the study area recorded in the South Yorkshire Sites and Monuments Record prior to the start of this project are John Carr House and the associated moated manor farm at New Lodge (See desk-based assessment, site nos. 33-35), and the sites of two mills at Burton Smithies – a paper and corn mill and a fulling, paper and woollen mill (site nos. 42-43). Water for the mills was brought from the River Dearne along a mill leat (site 48). Further sites recorded in the SMR just outside the study area include St Helen’s Chapel and Well (sites 5-6), Royston Cross (site 9), East Gawber Hall Colliery Fanhouse (site 37), the Ridings post-medieval house at Monk Bretton (site 5), and the Barnsley Canal, opened by 1804, which passes just to the south-west of the study area (site 29-30).

Other known features within the study area include the cropmark of an Iron Age-Romano-British field system, recently identified by Chris Scurfield (site 3), a small number of farmsteads recorded in the 1854 and 1896 first editions of the Ordnance Survey (sites 51-54) and a late-19^th century railway line (site 49) associated with a range of 19^th – early 20^th century collieries lying just beyond the study area (sites 45-47, 50). The 1892 Ordnance Survey also records a gravel pit (site 57) and a quarry (site 58), described as old suggesting their abandonment by this date. There is also the small Carlton Reservoir (site 56).

The 19^th to 20^th century landscape development of the study area can be broadly characterised as rural farmland with woodlands until the second half of the 19^th century. The two mills at Burton Smithies were the main industrial features that were in existence prior to the mid-19^th century. From the mid-19^th century the area became more industrialised with the creation of a number of collieries and the railway line that serviced them. It is only after the Second World War that the residential areas were built that now form Athersley North, Athersley South and New Lodge.