Elsecar

Elsecar
Yorkshire West Riding
Holy Trinity Parish Church in Elsecar
Location
Grid reference:	SE389001
Location:	53°29’46"N, 1°24’43"W
Data
Population:	2,500  (2001)
Post town:	Barnsley
Postcode:	S74
Dialling code:	01226
Local Government
Council:	Barnsley
Parliamentary constituency:	Barnsley East

Elsecar is village in the West Riding of Yorkshire which was a cradle of the early Industrial Revolution. It is close to Jump and Wentworth, it is found two miles south of Hoyland, six miles south of Barnsley and eight miles north-east of Sheffield.

The name ‘Elsecar’ is apparently a mixture of Old English and Old Norse: from the English personal name ‘Ælfsige’ (mentioned in Cartulary of Nostell Priory, 1259–66) and the Norse word kjarr, denoting a marsh or brushwood.

From the late 18th century, Elsecar was transformed into an 'industrial estate village' for nearby Wentworth Woodhouse, with multiple collieries and two major ironworks. It is seen as one of the UK's first model villages and a precursor to Saltaire.

A 1795 Newcomen steam engine at the Elsecar New Colliery is the oldest steam engine still in situ, anywhere in the world.

The village now attracts over 500,000 visitors each year, to its heritage centre, historic sites and park.

History

In 1870–72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Elsecar as having a population of 1912 and 353 dwelling places.

The village had developed rapidly since a century before, when it had been just a handful of cottages around a village green and a scattering of shallow coal pits, in a valley alongside an ancient stream.

Industrial Estate Village

Elsecar's development from the late 18th century can be seen as a microcosm of the whole Industrial Revolution in Britain. The village was nothing more than a series of farms until the 18th century. Although coal had been mined in the area since the 14th century, the first major colliery, Elsecar Old, was not sunk until 1750. It was taken on by the Marquis of Rockingham in 1752, later consolidated onto a hilltop to the west of the village and is thought to have been painted by George Stubbs.

The village was transformed from the 1790s at the direction of the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse, with the sinking of its first deep colliery, the cutting of a canal, the building of two ironworks and associated housing designed by the architect John Carr of York. As a result, Elsecar is now recognised to be one of the first model villages in the United Kingdom, and a precursor to historic places such as Saltaire.

The subsequent development and expansion of the village continued to be closely overseen by the Fitzwilliam dynasty. Additions to the village instructed by the Earls in the mid 19th century included rows of miners and ironworkers' cottages, a miners lodging house, church, indoor market, coaching inn, school, cricket club and architecturally impressive workshops, known as the New Yard. A private railway station for the Earl, including a waiting room for privileged and Royal guests, was added in 1870 and now serves as a nursery for local children.

Coal

The Earls oversaw expansion of deep coalmining and sinking of new collieries for over a century and maintained a direct controlling interest in the management of the village's collieries until nationalisation in 1947.

In 1794-5, the village's first deep colliery was sunk, a few yards the east of the village's proposed canal basin. Over the following years, Elsecar New Colliery was expanded and the original Elsecar (Old) Colliery modernised. In the 1840s and 1850s, two state-of-the-art collieries were sunk, Simon Wood and Elsecar Low (later renamed Hemingfield). The latter survives, has been rescued and is now in community ownership.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 included a column of Barnsley Seam coal which had been somehow mined intact by Elsecar miners and taken to London.

The last colliery to open was Elsecar Main in 1908. King George V went underground there in 1912, for which he received respect and recognition, as news had come through that morning of a terrible disaster at Cadeby Colliery. He was not the first though: King William IV, when Duke of Clarence, had been taken into Elsecar Old Colliery in 1828.

Elsecar Main Colliery was closed in October 1983.

Iron

John and William Darwin & Co. of Sheffield opened the first furnace at Elsecar Ironworks (at the bottom of Forge Lane) in 1795. In 1799 another ironworks was founded at Milton, by the Walker Brothers of Rotherham, less than a mile to the west of Elsecar, on a hilltop in full view of the village of Wentworth just across the valley.

The Earls maintained a close involvement in the village's two ironworks. Although leased to a series of major ironmasters from their establishment in the 1790s to closure in the 1880s. the ironworks were at times managed direct as part of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate. In the second half of the 19th century, both ironworks were leased and operated together by famous ironmakers the Dawes Brothers, originally from West Bromwich. The two main Elsecar ironworks were closed in the 1880s.

Heritage

Elsecar Heritage Centre

The landscape around the village has extensive archaeological remains and historic sites, which can be explored on organised guided tours.

They include ironworks ruins and ponds, furnace charging plateau, collieries, bell pits, footrills, mineshafts, waggon ways, the industrial canal and reservoir, canal basins, early-Victorian railway, clinker-reinforced trackways, lime kiln sites, coking furnaces and much else.

Elsecar Heritage Centre is a visitor attraction based in the former New Yard colliery workshops. Operated by Barnsley Museums, it has independent shops, studios, galleries, cafes and a large antiques centre.

Built heritage that survives in the village is similarly extensive, including miners and ironworkers housing, historic pubs, cricket club, parsonage, vicarage, toll house, miners lodging house, the Milton Hall exhibition hall, the church, steam mill, two schools, and the extensive buildings of the New Yard workshops and Elsecar Ironworks.

Elsecar-by-the-Sea

In 1910 a local amateur photographer, Herbert Parkin, took photographs of families paddling in the local reservoir (water)|reservoir and sent them into the Sheffield Star with the caption Elsecar-by-the-Sea. The name caught on and with the help of a good transport link from Sheffield by way of the local railway station, a thriving tourism business was established.

Between the wars, the local council created a public park to take advantage of the influx of visitors, on land granted by Earl Fitzwilliam, adding a boating jetty to the reservoir, a pavilion cafe and bandstands. The village flourished as 'the seaside resort at the heart of the Yorkshire coalfield'.

Since 2008, the name Elsecar-by-the-Sea has been used for the village gala, which takes place in the park each September.

Sport

• Cricket: Elsecar Cricket Club, established in 1854

Pictures

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Elsecar)

• 
  Former miners' and steelworkers' cottages by the village green
• 
  Former lodging house for miners (1853)
• 
  Milton Hall Community Centre (1870)
• 
  The Market Inn
• 
  Inclined Plane on the former tramway

Outside links

• Elsecar Heritage Centre
• Elsecar Community Website
• Photo site of Hoyland area featuring Elsecar

References

• Howse, Geoffrey:
  • ’Around Hoyland (Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999) ISBN 0-7509-2268-0
  • ’Around Hoyland A Second Selection (Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000) ISBN 0-7509-2726-7
  • ’Around Hoyland People & Places’ (Sutton Publishing, 2002) ISBN 0-7509-3148-5