You can't understand Sheffield without understanding Millstone Grit

Good afternoon and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune. Asking you to read an article about a specific type of stone might sound akin to asking you to read a piece about watching paint dry. But in the capable hands of writer Carey Davies — who regularly writes for the Guardian and who has just published his first book — Millstone Grit is brought to life. This isn’t just stone, he explains, but the backbone of Sheffield’s landscape, history and architecture. Settle in — this is a particularly beautiful read. But before that: the culture wins keep coming as Orchestras for All move here, plus Sheffield Heeley MP Louise Haigh’s plans for transport in your news briefing.

Your Tribune briefing

🎺 Yet another national arts organisation is moving to Sheffield. In May, it was the English Touring Opera and now it’s Orchestras for All, a youth orchestra which plans to set up shop in Canada House. The listed building has been vacant since 2011 and is currently being restored as a music hub with the help of Harmony Works charity, which promotes music education for young people.

🚆 Sheffield MP and new transport secretary Louise Haigh is itching to “move fast and fix things”, the Guardian reports. The new government reportedly plans to renationalise train operations ASAP, with legislation expected in the King’s Speech next week. They also want to improve infrastructure (although HS2 is still dead) and enable local authorities to make bus franchising easier and quicker.

🏠 A housing development which could kick start the regeneration of Sheffield’s east end has been granted planning permission. Housebuilder Citu have been given the go ahead to build 362 homes in the initial phase of the Attercliffe Waterside development, as well as a bridge over the canal. Our piece from 2023 about the area’s long-awaited regeneration is here.

Things to do

💍 Sheffield has long had a worldwide reputation for fine metalwork, making it the natural home for the Goldsmiths North contemporary silverware and jewellery fair. Taking place at Cutlers’ Hall, the fair is your chance to buy interesting, high quality work from over 50 independent makers from across Europe, including some local talent. Doors open on Friday to Saturday from 10am-5pm, and on Sunday from 10am-4pm.

🌈 Pinknic, Sheffield's biggest LGBTQ+ event, is coming back to the Peace Gardens this Saturday! As always, the family-friendly event will have a host of performers including local musicians and drag artists, as well as lots of stalls. The day will start with a unity parade from Barker’s Pool at 10.45am, before festivities start at the Peace Gardens at 11am.

🍄 Are you looking to reconnect with nature or find food from somewhere other than your local supermarket? This Sunday, wild food experts Forage Box will be hosting a foraging session in Endcliffe Park, which will include plant and fungi identification work, tasting wild ingredients and a wild snack. The three-hour course costs £35 and will begin at 11am.

You can't understand Sheffield without understanding Millstone Grit

“Gritstone sunsets are the most beautiful sunsets in the world.”

My climbing partner was coiling the rope, looking out across the Hope Valley from the top of Millstone Edge at the end of a long day in an April heatwave, our palms sore from the sandpaper-sharp rock. Someone who didn’t seem unduly sentimental, he said it with a strength of feeling that took me slightly by surprise.

Anyone familiar with the gritstone landscape, climber or otherwise, will know what he means, though. Storied crags like Almscliffe, Stanage, The Roaches or Windgather are high, loosely western-facing escarpments or outcrops, and as some of the last places in the landscape to catch the final rays of the day, close to cities, they are often visited for after-work climbs on ‘the grit’, or to simply take in the sunset. 

As the air cools, sounds clarify: a lapwing making a sound like a Space Invader; laughter drifting up from a pub somewhere in a valley below; the hiss of a rope dragged across the rough rock. Millstone Grit escarpments and outcrops often grant wonderful views up the heads of the dales that run down from the Pennine watershed. When the sun descends, it often forms spectacular alignments with the clefts of the valleys, golden light pooling between ridges like honey.

If you live in Sheffield, Millstone Grit is a rock you will almost certainly have walked on, climbed on or interacted with somehow. There is a good chance you are reading this within walls made from it. It is interwoven with the history of the city in literally fundamental ways. But its influence and significance goes beyond the recreational or the utilitarian; it has broken out from these categories, becoming a cultural force in itself. 

To understand how, it helps to know a bit about the nature of Millstone Grit itself. Commonly shorthanded to gritstone, Millstone Grit is an all-encompassing term for a wide range of similar, closely-related rocks (‘Coarse Grained Feldspatic Sandstone’ to geologists). These were all laid down as layers of sediment around 320-ish million years ago in huge river deltas and aquatic environments during the Carboniferous era. 

There are around 30 or so local variants of Millstone Grit – Pendle Grit, Silver Hills Sandstone, Kinder Grit, Todmorden Grit, Huddersfield White Rock, Five Clouds Sandstone, the Rough Rock, to name just a few. All these sedimentary sandstones are roughly textured and fantastically abrasive substances. Up close, they are a crystalline collage of hard shards, a mix of quartzite, feldspar and mica; when the sun lights up a slab of wet gritstone, it glistens like diamond dust.

You will have heard ‘grit’ used as a metaphor, evoking qualities that echo the rock. If someone has grit, they probably embody fine northern traits like integrity, resilience, and a sense that they shouldn’t be messed about with. When it comes to climbing, the granularity of gritstone can be doubled-edged, creating plenty of welcome friction, but also biting viciously if you fall foul of it. Perhaps this is why you need to have grit to climb it: without resilience, you won’t get far.

Sheffield climber Niall Grimes’ gruesome description of the shin-mincing consequences of a tumble on the gritstone outcrop of Black Rocks near Matlock has stayed with me: “what had been on my leg was now gathered on the horizontal edge; an agglomeration of skin, blood and hair, compacted together to resemble a piece of meaty down.” Not that this puts anyone off – Sheffield is famous for its climbing heritage and probably still contains more climbers per capita than any other UK city, thanks largely to the lure of easily-accessible gritstone climbing at Stanage, Burbage and the other Eastern Edges. 

But gritstone’s role in Sheffield’s history and culture is bigger than just climbing. Sheffield rests on a physical and economic foundation created in large part by Millstone Grit. If the Pennines are ‘the backbone of England’, then gritstone is the spine of the Pennines, appearing as far south as the hills near Stoke-on-Trent and as far north as the North Pennine fells, spanning Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and County Durham. 

Though it is often interwoven with other closely related Carboniferous sandstones, mudstones and coal measures, gritstone’s stubborn aversion to erosion means it often occupies the highest ground, capping the tallest fells and creating lofty moorland mesas fringed by wavelike escarpments, dropping down to steep-sided valleys that still hold the shape of the glaciers which ground through them during the last Ice Age. 

This mesa topography, with its high plateaus and steep-sided valleys, gives rise to particularly fast-flowing rivers in the gritstone-topped Pennines and its foothills. In the early industrial era, before coal-powered steam engines became the dominant power source, water power was king, which led to the burgeoning of industrial activity along rivers. 

With its many swift watercourses, the hydrology of the Pennines made it one of the earliest cradles of the Industrial Revolution, with the presence of river-based industry helping to lay the economic foundations for many of the towns and cities that would rapidly burgeon into modern industrial powerhouses. 

Sheffield was one of these water-powered Pennine places, with five beer-brown rivers tumbling rapidly down from the high Millstone Grit moors to the west of the city. Here, the Don, the Rivelin, the Porter Brook, the Loxley and the Sheaf powered a metalworking industry which stretched back to at least the fourteenth century, helped by the presence of local ironstones, abundant sources of wood and coal, and a general culture of self-reliant, freelance craftsmanship, fostered by the region’s comparative isolation. 

This era has left Sheffield’s watercourses full of industrial archaeology: dams, weirs, packhorse bridges and crumbling mill ruins dot the rivers, albeit long-since softened and composted back into nature, with herons hunting in the old mill ponds and marsh marigolds blooming in goits that once fed cutlers’ forges. 

Millstone Grit’s contribution to industry didn’t stop there. The tough, abrasive rock was also ideally suited for making grindstones, and along with other local sandstones it was put to work sharpening knives, needles and cutlery (in places you can see disused grindstones given a second life by their incorporation into the fabric of the city). 

It was from this base, with its rooting in geography and geology, that Sheffield burgeoned into a steelmaking superpower in the eighteenth century, a growth charged by landmark innovations like the crucible method and the Bessemer process. Nature and industry flow together in the veins of the city, mingle and interlock in its DNA.

This sense of a dissolving distinction between industry and nature is also evident in the objects which Millstone Grit was named after: wheel-shaped millstones, punctured with square axis holes in the centre, which were used to grind grain. The rise of geological science in Britain around the eighteenth century was closely linked to the excavation of the earth for industry, and scientists often adopted the name already given to rocks by quarrymen and miners; hence this stubbly sandstone became named after one of the industrial uses it was made to perform. Gritstones had been used for milling grain as far back as the Norman conquest, but the term ‘Millstone Grit’ is thought to have been coined by geologist John Whitehurst in Derbyshire, a centre of millstone production at the time.

The grit of Stanage, Burbage and the other Eastern Edges is known as Chatsworth Grit (or Rivelin Grit, where it can also be found) and was particularly well-suited to making millstones. Its robust uniformity and lack of lines of weakness meant it could be freely worked by stonemasons, and its coarse surface was effective at its job of shearing and tearing grain. 

Millstone Grit’s heyday as a millstone was during the industrial boom years of the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century it was supplanted in the mills by wheels made of French chert and cement, which left less debris in the flour (in other words, it was less, well, gritty). The shift was so sudden that it became uneconomical to pay for the onerous labour of transporting millstones which had already been quarried and cut, and today, wheels of Millstone Grit still extensively litter the landscape below the likes of Stanage and Millstone Edge, steadily sinking under moss and bracken as they wait for a buyer that will never come. All that is solid melts into soil.

The Peak District national park has adopted a millstone as its logo, and they can be seen on the sides of the road as you enter the park. Their shapes remind me of what the Peak District looks like from space at night: a dark diamond in the centre of a wheel of urban light. Well-known Sheffield poet and climber Helen Mort describes the millstones as resembling “strange eyes” or “polo mints”, she writes: “nothing is as satisfying as the feeling of your hands burning after a day on the grit, the bite of it, the sense of being still in the turning centre of a small, hard world.”

Millstone Grit is at the heart of Sheffield in a literal sense, too. Kinderscout Grit was used to construct Sheffield town hall; Ashover Grit is used in Sheffield Cathedral; Chatsworth Grit is found in the gatehouses of the general cemetery and the botanical gardens; the Rough Rock was used to sculpt those lovely seed-shaped planters in Tudor Square and the paving of the Peace Gardens. Alongside similar sandstones, it is used extensively as a housebuilding material across the city’s suburbs, particularly in the west. The interior of gritstone is a sandy colour, but its exterior can naturally turn greyer due to iron oxides leaking to the surface. 

Even so, in an urban context, Millstone Grit and similar stones can be especially gloomy, stained by the industrial era, when factories, forges and private homes all flung out combusted coal from their chimneys. The soot settled widely into the pores of the gritstone, creating black bitumen-like streaks across houses and mills, fusing these two Carboniferous substances together, the locked-up energy of ancient sunlight dissipated to turn whole towns and cities the colour of ash. Though perhaps not quite as evident as in the likes of valley towns like Hebden Bridge or Halifax, you can see this effect in Sheffield too. 

This might sound rather grim, and it certainly can create an ambivalent atmosphere. But it also gives rise to places of unmistakable character. I entered the world surrounded by Millstone Grit, in a hospital built from it. For the first 10 years of my life I was taken to worship in a Millstone Grit church, a grand soot-stained neo-gothic Protestant temple of the sort that are still common sights in Sheffield and the other Pennine towns. I went to a school partly constructed from Millstone Grit. My grandmother and other ancestors are interred under Millstone Grit monuments and headstones in places across the north of England. I am writing this inside a house built from Millstone Grit, part of a Victorian terrace originally built to provide accommodation for the workforce of a large worsted mill nearby, which is also made from – no prizes for guessing.

At the age of 18, when I was looking around Sheffield, deciding whether to go to university there – which I eventually did – I remember seeing the soot-flecked gritstone-built terraces of Broomhill, Crookes or Walkley and finding something reassuring in the way they echoed the houses of my hometown of Otley, in the lower reaches of Wharfedale, where Millstone Grit is also the underlying landscape-forming rock. 

I knew nothing of the geological connection between the two places at the time; it was more of an instinct of belonging, an unconscious tug towards the safety of home ground. It feels slightly embarrassing to admit this, although I know I’m not entirely alone. A staff member at the Peak District national park, also from a similar bit of Wharfedale, once told me that his decision to settle in Sheffield was similarly influenced by the sight of the Eastern Edges, those great gritstone escarpments which are like bigger versions of the landforms of our home valley (Almscliffe crag, the Chevin, the Cow and Calf). 

Then, of course, there are the countless climbers who have found themselves drawn to Sheffield. Then there are the people who came to the city for study or work, got hooked on climbing or just fell in love with the Peak District, and ended up staying — all of whom contribute to the social mix of the city. 

The gravity of gritstone is strong, capable of altering the trajectory of lives and places. To my mind, Millstone Grit is not simply part of the separate province of nature. It has been put to work, found a vocation, acquired an identity. It moulds minds and culture. It anchors us, stains our grain, whittles and shapes our history, just as we shape it.

And yet, Millstone Grit still carries the memories of wild, strange places, reminding us of nature’s indifference. I find it extraordinary to look across the city from some high perch like Ringinglow or Blacka Moor and imagine a thread 320 million years long, linking all that urban modernity with an alien planet before the dinosaurs, or even flowers, had evolved; a strange, steamy world of tall scaly trees, dragonflies the size of crows, and monstrous millipedes longer than a six-foot tall person. 

Or I think of the much, more recent, but equally weird world of the last Ice Age, where glaciers would have gripped the Pennines (a world only separated from ours by a global temperature difference of just 5C, which gives a disconcerting sense of how ‘easy’ it is to trigger enormous environmental shifts). I think of those industrial remnants being undone by entropy, seized by tree roots and slowly squeezed into the belly of the woods, sliding back into what Ted Hughes called “the only future / into earth,” to become remade in some other unimaginable world. Maybe time is shaped like a millstone, endlessly circling back on itself.

On the moors and wind-buffered escarpments, like Derwent Edge or the flanks of Kinder Scout, it often has an altogether different character to the rigid sternness it exhibits in the mills and terraces. Up here it is a liquid shapeshifter, freely impersonating animals and objects. We give these outcropping rock formations names like the Sphinx, the Eagle, the Turtle, the Camel, the Dancing Bear, the Wool Packs, the Salt Cellar, The Roaches, the Coach and Horses, the Pig’s Head, the Rabbit’s Ears, the Baboon’s Head, the Boxing Gloves. 

People come to these landmarks to climb, to congregate, to play, to walk, to watch sunsets. They are natural gathering places, where we look out over a wider horizon, feel the freedom of nature, and perhaps intuit something of the dizzying vastness of time and space. Our everyday pressures and problems can feel lighter, lifted from us like grains of grit whipped away by the wind, melting into air. Millstone Grit both reminds us of history, and in its wild way, lets us escape it.

As of this month, Carey's book, National Parks of the United Kingdom is available for purchase. It is a journey through the natural history, cultural heritage and artistic legacy of the UK's 15 national parks.