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Rowan
May
Project Officer
ArcHeritage
54 Campo Lane
Sheffield
South Yorkshire
S1 2EG
United Kingdom
Tel: (0)114 2728884
Level 2 building recording of The Old Smithy indicated that it appears to be of mid-19th-century date and was probably purpose built as a workshop, likely a smithy from the outset, having a long association with the Sellers family, recorded at the site by 1891. The smithy is a single-storey structure of local limestone in a random rubble construction. It has a pitched roof with Welsh slates on the north side and corrugated iron on the south side. It has an irregular plan, set on a gentle slope with a pitched floor. There are four windows of varying size.
The wide street entrance has a pair of sliding doors. A functional two-unit plan is evident from the internal flooring, with a wooden shoeing bay at the north end and a stone slab working area at the south end. The latter includes a hearth on the west wall, a work-bench with shelving above, and a hard stone base for a water trough. There is a depression in the floor where a wooden block once supported the anvil. The stone and brick hearth appears to have been reduced in length, and may originally have been sufficient to carry out heavy smithing work. Curiously, the hearth opening is framed by some architectural pieces, which may have come from one of two nearby old public houses that were lost in 1937 and 1958. These might be worth retaining within the building's proposed new interior.