A HISTORY OF ECCLESFIELD PARISH

Compiled by Joan & Mel Jones of Chapeltown & High Green Archive

To the casual visitor, the northern suburbs of the present-day Sheffield Metropolitan District, which include the modern parish of Ecclesfield, are indistinguishable from the outer residential districts of other large urban areas throughout the country, containing as they do, extensive areas of semi-detached and detached houses and bungalows, largely of red brick with tile roofs, intermingled with woods, stretches of farmland, parks and playing fields, and a number of modern industrial complexes, and cut through by a number of important roads containing ribbons of retail shops. However, further exploration would reveal that embedded in this suburban sprawl are what were once four separate village communities of Ecclesfield, Chapeltown, Grenoside and High Green, together with a number of smaller settlements – such as Charlton Brook, Butterthwaite, Whitley, Bracken Hill and Warren – that once had their own individual identity and character. Even today these old settlement cores are easily recognized by their building materials – local sandstone and slate.

All these settlements were once part of the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Ecclesfield which, before its break-up into a number of smaller ecclesiastical districts in the nineteenth century, including ones at Grenoside, High Green and Chapeltown, was once one of the largest parishes in England, covering nearly 50,000 acres or nearly 78 square miles. This extensive parish was served by the Parish Church of St Mary, standing proudly on its eminence in the village of Ecclesfield, together with chapels-of-ease at Bradfield (now St Nicholas’ Parish Church in the separate parish of Bradfield) and Chapeltown (in the Middle Ages Chapeltown was simply called Chappell, after the chapel there).

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