Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 1st September 2024
What you'll find on Brightside's brownfields. New hope for the Upper Don Trail. and the return of the Sheaf. Plus, why cull badgers?
Morning. The Upper Don Trail has been on the way for some years now. The route alongside the upriver banks of our biggest river has been planned and endorsed by the council and local MPs, but getting it built and open is quite another matter.
If you’ve never ventured to the Don hidden between the industrial estates of Penistone and Club Mill Roads, you should, because it’s spectacular. Close your ears to the traffic and there are stretches where you could be idling in a national park. This week I heard from the Upper Don Trail Trust that the country’s move to renewable power might just unlock this riverbank for all of us.
I’ve also visited Brightside to see the last season of a famous (to ecologists) brownfield site that’s anything but brown just now. But the 150 or more species of plants growing there will soon be covered over for a new metalworking site for the nuclear industry.
And I hope our double century of full paying members enjoyed their bespoke post yesterday, in response to the new government’s mixed attitude to culling badgers announced this week. (They want to stop it, but not just yet, so the badgers over the border in Derbyshire will stay in the firing line for another season at least.)
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Water Power
There’s a spectacular stretch of River Don few of us know about, yards from Penistone Road. Technically, there’a wide trail heading north from the industrial estate at the end of the surfaced section of Club Mill Road. At present a community of travellers live there.
On the riverside of the trail, another footpath leads off to follow the winding Don, where a groundbreaking trial of tangled branches to strengthen the river bank appears to have succeeded.
There’s a lot going on here: the river has dragonflies and otters, and a long awaited section of the Upper Don Trail waiting to be built to link Wardsend Cemetery Heritage Park, Hillsborough (and beyond), to Kelham and the city centre.
And very soon, if an application for the ‘Erection of a Voltage Management System’ on the old Neepsend Power Station site goes ahead, Club Mill Road will fill with construction traffic for a new section of the country’s renewable power infrastructure.
All that’s needed to pull all this together is for the applicant for the renewable power site to agree to a few adjustments to make their work even more green and sustainable.
The Upper Don Trail Trust have made some gentle suggestions, which you can support and learn about at the council’s planning portal.
Improving the trail next to the site to complete a link for the Upper Don Trail for starters. Working with the council to help the travellers move to a safer site. And Simon Ogden from the Upper Don Trail Trust also notes the hillside above the proposed new Voltage Management System appears to be linked to the site’s current owners, and also includes a well used but poorly maintained path to Wardsend Cemetery. Could this be improved too, not least as it offers fabulous views of the city as part of the new Parkwood Springs country park for the city developments?
There’s even a footbridge on site that could link Parkwood Springs and Neepsend to the Hillsborough site of Sheffield College, if it could be improved and unlocked.
Local councillors, many local businesses, Friends of Wardsend Cemetery and Friends of Parkwood Springs all support the suggestions made by the Upper Don Trail Trust, says Simon.
“This is a site on the River Don that’s been sacrificed at least three times for industry and power generation.” he says, referring to the original Neepsend gas works, power station and resultant spoil heaps, which are still there on site.
“So surely it’s time now for our green power network to look to the future?”
The Brownfields of Brightside
There’s nothing brown about the fields by the River Don about to be turned into a new steelworks for the Ministry of Defence. You imagine a brownfield site to be kind of muddy grey and dirty, but the huge plot just south of Weedon Street is green and yellow and purple, and had rabbits and the smell of predatory foxes just a few weeks ago, says Gerry Firkins, my theoretical guide to one of the city’s oldest and most celebrated semi-rewilded post industrial sites.
Unfortunately we’ve arrived a week too late: a site manager in a hard hat bars our entrance, as drilling work has already begun. So we patrol the edges of land once covered in workshops of the Brightside and Tinsley steel works that shipped steel components around the world.
The remains of centuries of metalworking industry are deep in the ground, but we’re looking at the way nature has overrun that history and established new relationships of plants and animals.
“Tumbling Mustard” says Gerry, above a yellow spindly flower growing near a concrete barrier post. He throws is his impenetrable but official botanist’s latin name for reference, not least because Tumbling Mustard is also known as Jim Hill Mustard and Hedge Mustard, along with the official Sisymbrium altissimum.
“It’s the closest thing we have to American Tumbleweed,” Gerry explains. When the plant dies off after flowering, its dry stems are caught by the wind and roll away spreading their seeds across Meadowhall and Rotherham.
Nearby he’s quite excited to find a fairly uncommon Narrow-leaved Ragwort, an invader from South Africa, then there’s the rather beautiful Wild Fennel, and over (and in) the hazard warning fence there’s Goat’s Rue, another invasive species, widespread in Sheffield thanks not least to enterprising twentieth century garden traders who appear to have travelled the city’s waste ground to collect seeds and plants, to sell on to wealthier householders who fancied a few exotic easy to grow flowers in their back garden.
There’s a large abundant apple tree, likely to have grown from a core thrown from someone’s car, and further along, in and around a tree pit created when the Five Weirs Walk was young, a collection of taller plants still enjoying the fertilised and deep soil provided for the long lost tree.
The riverside has Pellitory of the Wall, an old English plant found on Norman castles as well as urban river walks, and Gerry warns me about the confusing blue-flowered Green Alkanet, named due to its dyeing qualities, he tells me, but don’t touch it, he says, as its hairs are like fibreglass and you can yourself picking them out from a Green Alkanet attack to your fingers days later.
Gerry and other botanists have visited the site for years, watching it grow and develop. He explains how an abandoned concrete or stone covered industrial site will gather dust and pioneering seeds in the wind, or from passing birds, along with bacteria and nutrients. Together, all this grows into the beginnings of soil and small plants, with some muscular plants, like Wall Valerian, actually cracking the hard surfaces to allow in more dust and soil and seeds.
Some grasses and plants like Pearlwort will grow their stems across the ground looking for new cracks to take root.
Taller plants then establish and trap even more dust and seeds, and eventually trees like Silver Birch and bushier plants can get going. Meanwhile, fly tipping can bring invasive and other garden plants and more soil with different microbes and nutrients.
Over the years Gerry’s found over 150 plant species here. The nature of this kind of wild urban site means “you haven’t got a clue what you’re going to find,” he says.
And now it’s all to go under a new steelworks growing up from the old factories demolished a generation ago, and the fields of gold and green and purple that moved in between developments. Gerry’s not too worried about the loss: rather a new factory here than a more sensitive wild place elsewhere, he says.
“This has just been a great ephemeral site,” he says.
The rabbits, and insects and finches will miss it, but they’ll find somewhere else, he says. And so will a new generation of Tumbling Mustard and Goats Rue and maybe Narrow-leaved Ragwort. There’ll be demolition elsewhere, and new brownfield sites with their dust and pavement cracks and dumped bacteria.
“And so it goes on,” says Gerry.
I’ll have a bit more on the Weedon Street weeds (a term I suspect Gerry would never use) in a longer post for full members.
The Return of The Sheaf
Simon Ogden is very busy (see above). He’s also very excited about the first sighting of the Sheaf in the city centre for over 100 years. Keep your eyes on the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust CulvertCam to see more of the city’s founding river reappear.
I met him just before the first section of concrete was taken out of the Sheffield Castle development site, and we marvelled at how the city’s river had been covered up and criss-crossed with layers of concrete and metal and various access roads and steps and industrial history that is now being peeled away by the project to uncover the land where Sheffield started.
The crews on site had removed two huge metal girders from the structures above the Sheaf - one disconcertingly marked as originating in L**ds.
Perched above the terracing that will help illustrate the long lost castle landscape is a small twentieth century ruin, which may be retained as an example of the civic modernism of the original Castle Market. I understand the ruin marks the site of the twisty staircase that allowed access to the disappointing old stones some of us were shown as children as the remains of the city’s grand castle. There’s an option for the ruin to become some kind of interpretation centre, Simon tells me.
The river will gradually be uncovered over the next few weeks, he says, adding that plans are not yet finalised as to how the Sheaf should be accessed when the new city park will be opened in about 18 months time. It’s about five metres down, he says, but he hopes it’ll be possible for visitors to actually get down to the riverside.
There’ll be a fish pass and planting, so the daylight finally reaching the Sheaf after 100 years should welcome wildlife as well as people. Find out more at this year’s Castlegate Festival on 14th and 15th September.
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 1st September)
A tiny selection from our What’s On Out There in August news and listings post. New September post coming shortly - please subscribe (below) to get it first!
Mon 2nd - Fri 6th Sept - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start
Tues 3rd - CPREPDSY Bat Walk, at Dore
Weds 4th - Social Walk from Longshaw (5m)
Thurs 5th Sept - Tour of Britain (men) start in city centre
6-15th Sept - Sheffield Walking Festival
6-15th Sept - Heritage Open Days
Sat 7th & 15th Sept - The famed Drainspotting Walk (Sheffield's Victorian pavement features)
Sat 7th - Ranger Led Conservation Morning, Wardsend Cemetery
Sun 8th - Diverse Habitats Walk at Sheffield General Cemetery
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I was interested to read your piece about the brownfield land off Weedon Street. I used to work in an office across the road from that site (long since demolished). More recently Weedon Street has been one of the best places in Sheffield to see Bee Orchids. In June, dozens of flower-spikes can be seen along the roadside bank and the edge of the brownfield plot. It's also home to Small Heath and Common Blue butterflies.
Refreshingly, well-researched, and interesting. Thank you.