Beeley Wood is a woodland

Woodland

Ecologically, a woodland is a low-density forest forming open habitats with plenty of sunlight and limited shade. Woodlands may support an understory of shrubs and herbaceous plants including grasses. Woodland may form a transition to shrubland under drier conditions or during early stages of...

 in the north of the City of Sheffield

Sheffield

Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...

, near Middlewood. It is one of 35 ancient woodland

Ancient woodland

Ancient woodland is a term used in the United Kingdom to refer specifically to woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 or before in England and Wales . Before those dates, planting of new woodland was uncommon, so a wood present in 1600 was likely to have developed naturally...

 areas within the Sheffield City boundary. An ancient woodland is defined as a site that has been continuously occupied by woodland from the year 1600 or before.

Overview

The woods are situated on the eastern side of the River Don between the village of Oughtibridge

Oughtibridge

Oughtibridge is a residential village on the northern outskirts of Sheffield within the bounds of Bradfield Parish Council. The village stands northwest of the city centre in the valley of the River Don...

 and the Sheffield suburb of Middlewood. Most common access from the Middlewood end of the wood is from the end of Clay Wheels Lane or from Middlewood Road South over the Don by the Rocher footbridge. The woods cover an area of approximately 60 hectares and slope up quite steeply from the river gaining around 70 metres in height before ending at farmland. The wood is traversed by two public footpaths, the lower of these is a pleasant and recently re-covered riverside walk which is part of the Upper Don Walk, a scenic walk by the river from the centre of Sheffield to Oughtibridge. The other public footpath runs the length of the upper wood at its highest point, there are many other paths not marked on the OS

Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...

 map. Beeley Wood is traversed by the famous Woodhead

Woodhead Line

The Woodhead Line was a railway line linking Sheffield, Penistone and Manchester in the north of England. A key feature of the route is the passage under the high moorlands of the northern Peak District through the Woodhead Tunnels...

 railway line, there is one level crossing and one footbridge for pedestrians to cross the line. The woods are home to a large colony of bat

Bat

Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera "hand" and pteron "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly,...

s and all three species of woodpecker

Woodpecker

Woodpeckers are near passerine birds of the order Piciformes. They are one subfamily in the family Picidae, which also includes the piculets and wrynecks. They are found worldwide and include about 180 species....

 native to Britain can be seen in the woods. In spring

Spring (season)

Spring is one of the four temperate seasons, the transition period between winter and summer. Spring and "springtime" refer to the season, and broadly to ideas of rebirth, renewal and regrowth. The specific definition of the exact timing of "spring" varies according to local climate, cultures and...

 there is a large covering of bluebells

Common Bluebell

Hyacinthoides non-scripta, commonly known as the common bluebell, is a spring-flowering bulbous perennial plant. -Taxonomy:...

 on the woodland floor.

History

The earliest written reference to Beeley Wood is in a deed dated from 1161 in which the monks of Ecclesfield Priory

Ecclesfield Priory

Ecclesfield Priory was a religious house of Benedictine monks, lying in the village of Ecclesfield, north of Sheffield in Yorkshire, United Kingdom.-Early history:...

 were given permission to graze their flock every year from January to Easter in a large wood stretching from Birley Edge down to the River Don. Beeley Wood is a surviving part of this large wood and part of it is still called Priory Wood. Further mention was made in a document released upon the death of Thomas de Furnival in 1332 when Beeley Wood was named as one of eleven locations under the heading of Woods, Moors and Commons. Under this agreement people were allowed to graze their animals in the wood. However by the 16th century Beeley Wood had become a coppice

Coppicing

Coppicing is a traditional method of woodland management which takes advantage of the fact that many trees make new growth from the stump or roots if cut down. In a coppiced wood, young tree stems are repeatedly cut down to near ground level...

 wood in which the pasturing of animals was discouraged. At the end of the 16th century Beeley Wood was one of eleven coppice woods in Sheffield which were mentioned in a document drawn up for Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury

Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury

Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, 7th Earl of Waterford, KG was was a peer in the peerage of England.He was the eldest surviving son of George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, by the latter's first marriage to Gertrude Manners, daughter of the first Earl of Rutland.In 1568, Gilbert was...

.
By the 1890s the coppicing of Beeley Wood along with the other coppice woods in Sheffield was coming to an end because of reduced profits and woodland management problems. The wood was allowed to become a "high forest" with the strongest growth of a coppiced tree allowed to grow into a fully grown standard tree. Many of the older and sickly trees were cleared away at this time and replaced by saplings of trees that were not native to the Sheffield area, such as beech

Beech

Beech is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia and North America.-Habit:...

, sweet chestnut

Sweet Chestnut

Castanea sativa is a species of the flowering plant family Fagaceae, the tree and its edible seeds are referred to by several common names such Sweet Chestnut or Marron. Originally native to southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, it is now widely dispersed throughout Europe and parts of Asia, such as...

, common lime

Tilia × europaea

Tilia × europaea L., generally known as the Common Lime, is a naturally occurring hybrid between Tilia cordata and Tilia platyphyllos...

 and sycamore. In late 1898 the Duke of Norfolk's

Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk

Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, , styled Baron Maltravers until 1856 and Earl of Arundel and Surrey between 1856 and 1860, was a British Unionist politician and philanthropist...

 forester planted Beeley Wood with 60 acres (242,811.6 m²) of timber trees such as ash

Ash tree

Fraxinus is a genus flowering plants in the olive and lilac family, Oleaceae. It contains 45-65 species of usually medium to large trees, mostly deciduous though a few subtropical species are evergreen. The tree's common English name, ash, goes back to the Old English æsc, while the generic name...

, elm

Elm

Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the genus Ulmus in the plant family Ulmaceae. The dozens of species are found in temperate and tropical-montane regions of North America and Eurasia, ranging southward into Indonesia. Elms are components of many kinds of natural forests...

, sycamore, birch

Birch

Birch is a tree or shrub of the genus Betula , in the family Betulaceae, closely related to the beech/oak family, Fagaceae. The Betula genus contains 30–60 known taxa...

, lime, sweet chestnut and beech

Beech

Beech is a genus of ten species of deciduous trees in the family Fagaceae, native to temperate Europe, Asia and North America.-Habit:...

. The young trees were ordered from a nursery in Cheshire

Cheshire

Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...

 and were delivered to Wadsley Bridge railway station.

Mining and quarrying

Although not apparent today, Beeley Wood was once an area of industry with mining and quarrying taking place. Ganister

Ganister

A ganister is hard, fine-grained quartzose sandstone, or orthoquartzite, used in the manufacture of silica brick typically used to line furnaces...

 was the material that was mined, this is a type of hard sandstone

Sandstone

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized minerals or rock grains.Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any colour, but the most common colours are tan, brown, yellow,...

 used in the manufacture of silica bricks used to line industrial furnace

Furnace

A furnace is a device used for heating. The name derives from Latin fornax, oven.In American English and Canadian English, the term furnace on its own is generally used to describe household heating systems based on a central furnace , and sometimes as a synonym for kiln, a device used in the...

s. The Drift mining

Drift mining

Drift mining is either the mining of a placer deposit by underground methods, or the working of coal seams accessed by adits driven into the surface outcrop of the coal bed. Drift is a more general mining term, meaning a near-horizontal passageway in a mine, following the bed or vein of ore. A...

 method was used because of the slope of the land in Beeley Wood and the mines went into the hillside for a long way and to a great depth. The fact that the wood is on a slope enabled gravity trackways to be used to transport the Ganister down to the valley bottom. The Ganister was also quarried in at least one location in the woods and the overgrown remnants of a large quarry can still be seen today. The largest of the mines was the Beeley Wood Mine, owned by the Silica Fire Brick Company and managed by J.T. Minnis for many years, in the 1920s and 1930s over 30 workers were employed and 12 ponies were used.

Other industry

There is other industry on the eastern (Middlewood) fringes of the wood with the Beeley Wood Works situated at the end of Clay Wheels Lane, this is currently occupied by the Abbey Stainless Steel Company but has a long history dating back to 1749 when it was known as the Nova Scotia Tilt

Trip hammer

A trip hammer, also known as a helve hammer, is a massive powered hammer used in:* agriculture to facilitate the labor of pounding, decorticating and polishing of grain;...

 Company. For many years there was a large Union Carbide

Union Carbide

Union Carbide Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company. It currently employs more than 2,400 people. Union Carbide primarily produces chemicals and polymers that undergo one or more further conversions by customers before reaching consumers. Some are high-volume...

 factory in this area but this closed several years ago with the site lying disused for some time. The 45 acres (182,108.7 m²) site received planning permission in January 2009 to be used as a "Recycling Village" run by the firm Ballast Phoenix Ltd. who will initially recycle the ash from Sheffield's main Energy from Waste

Waste-to-energy

Waste-to-energy or energy-from-waste is the process of creating energy in the form of electricity or heat from the incineration of waste source. WtE is a form of energy recovery...

incinerator.