The best running trails around Silkstone

A mixture of history, café, shops, geese by the river and somewhere to sit outside. This is a good place to stop on a walk that welcomes walkers and their dogs.

The Silkstone Boundary Stone at Lower Coates Farm depicts a hot air balloon which flew over the parish in the 19th Century.

Woolley Manor Farm is a Grade II listed building dating from the 17th Century.

The disused railway is now the Trans Pennine Trail. Built in 1880 as a ‘mineral’ line to carry coal from South Yorkshire into Lancashire. The line was electrified in the 1950s and it was closed in 1982. The second and older disused railway (over the stile from the TPT and across the field into the wood) was laid in 1852 and went as far as Moorend at Silkstone Common. It was built by the South Yorkshire Railway Company to carry coal from the mines in the Moorend, Huskar and Old Sovereign Collieries. The railway of 1852 stopped at the curving overgrown embankment to the east of the cottages, coal coming from Moorend Colliery. The pit-shaft was close to the terraced houses on the other side of the railway together with a ‘day-hole’ or ‘drift’ which slopes downwards into the coal seam. Another day-hole into the same pit was flooded in 1838 and 26 children were drowned. (Huskar Pit disaster, memorials in Nabs Wood, Silkstone Common and Silkstone Church.

Where the new houses stand on Beacon Hill a Victorian house stood. When it was being built in 1867 the remains of a beacon were discovered under the ground. Beacons were established in the 1800s to signal messages over long distances to give warning of invasion by an enemy. A little way up Hall Royd Lane a high bank with old stone retaining wall marks the site of Hall Royd Colliery. Before 1802 the Common was open moorland but with the Enclosure in 1802 the land went into ownership of local landowners.

On opposite sides of the then turnpike road were two public houses. The Bonny Bunch of Roses (recently demolished) was build in 1831 by William Tattershall on one side and the Station Inn built in 1853, a year before the railway was opened. A public house stood there previous to that date, called the Junction. Under the railway bridge, note where the original single trackline of 1854, sometime later was widened to double-track so the bridge was widened also. Look for the masons marks on the stones.

The Beyer-Garratt engine (2-8-0+0-8-2, number 2395/69999 LNER Class U1) was a double engine built in 1925 for banking heavy coal trains on the Woodhead route. This is one of a number of Silkstone Parish Boundary stones.

A lovely church and site of the Huskar memorial to a mine disaster. The Church of all Saints was built on the remains of an old Saxon Church. Building commenced about 1150 and was completed in 1495. It is built of York stone with an internal oak roof. During the Commonwealth under Cromwell, the wall paintings in the church were whitewashed over and horses stabled in the church. Near the boundary wall there is a large rectangular pointed monument. This is the memorial to the 26 children who lost their lives in the Huskar Pit disaster in July 1838. These children were buried in the graveyard in separate coffins in seven graves. Note the children's ages. The resulting inquiry led to the 1842 Mines Act which sought to introduce some protection for child miners and meant that all girls and boys under the age of ten were prohibited from working underground