HCS Visit to Penistone in May 2025

A group of 19 members and friends enjoyed a guided tour from Richard Galiford, assisted by Marlene Marshall of the Penistone Archive Group. 

The tour on Wednesday, May 21, 2025 began at St John the Baptist Church in Penistone, a site which dates from the 900s AD. It’s Grade I listed with some notable monuments (and graves) in the church and graveyard.

The church sits within a conservation area and was originally on the top of a hill surrounded by farm dwellings and a small settlement which in 1390s became a chartered market town with the buying and selling of livestock on the streets next to the parish church.  The church was extended in the mid-1300s to provide what is the nave. From earliest times it’s had a prominent place within the community and at the centre of people’s lives in terms of occasional offices – baptisms, weddings and funerals.

The parish of Penistone itself was fairly extensive, well in excess of 45 square miles. The Parish of Thurlstone was carved out of the Penistone parish in the 1900s. Thurlstone itself was bigger than Penistone up until the arrival of the trans-Pennine railway in the 1850s and various industries in Penistone grew up alongside this development including Camel Laird which made parts for the First and Second World War efforts and became significant both nationally and internationally.

The church is well worth a visit and has a superb nave roof with 12 timber corbels and 33 carved roof bosses. The roof bosses show carvings of flowers and oak and maple leaves dating them to around 1375. The tower dates from 1500 and stands 80 feet high with a peal of eight bells. Its design signifies the period when church towers were built or rebuilt, a period of growing prosperity and trade, particularly for Penistone for its cloth making.

Penistone Grammar school, one of the oldest schools in the country, began in the church in the 1690s. A stained glass window installed in 1992 depicts its 600th anniversary. The school eventually acquired buildings on a piece of land behind the church on its north side called Church Flatts before its move to its present location in Penistone near the Weir Field at the turn of the 20th Century.

Richard showed us the site of the Cloth Hall and the Market Hall plus the Penistone Paramount which still hosts many events and a cinema. This building adjoins the council offices and the Carnegie Free Library. Our visit culminated in the new open market hall.

An interesting part of Richard’s talk was about the history of football. Sheffield lays its claim as the home of modern football but the town of Penistone can better be credited with nurturing the beautiful game in its infancy thanks to three local men.

On the field surrounding Penistone Grammar School the rules of modern football began to take shape. Over 160 years before Manchester City’s John Stones would grace the school grounds, two Victorian schoolboys and their headmaster were kicking the ball about on Fair Fields, unaware of how this school game would evolve.

Samuel Sunderland, John Charles Shaw and John Marsh were to become instrumental in shaping the rules of how the game is played across the world today. There is much more on this subject on this website: https://www.aroundtownmagazine.co.uk/penistones-forgotten-founding-fathers-of-football/