Sid’s Sites – Heeley Churchyard

Heeley Churchyard

Between 1848 and 1934, there were 6,330 burials, almost half were children.  The first and second vicars, Henry Denson Jones and William J Odom have monuments in the front section, and the Brownells of Newfield Hall, who had 4 spinster daughters, are in the family vault, which is to the left just before you enter the church. 

Their mansion was next to Newfield Hall Farm, now the site of Gleadless Medical Centre.   Near the chancel is a memorial stone to the memory of Thomas Woller, a retired surgeon living in Heeley who was the brother of Margaret, the school teacher of Charlotte Bronte.

A noticeable feature in the churchyard is the lofty obelisk resting on an immense block of granite which took 20 horses to draw up the hill.  It is to the memory of John Shortridge, he married Ellen Leach at St Bartholomew in the village of Chipping, Lancashire.  John was the contractor for the Wicker Arches, Redmires Dams, and other enterprises were running the first horse bus from the town centre to the Red Lion at Heeley, and owning of a brick quarry at Heeley whose kilns are the only ones that have survived in Sheffield.  They can be seen at the rear of Pagett’s builders yard on Broadfield Road.  John, in the early 1850s, was living at Chipping House which he had named after the village where Ellen was Glossop and Ellen at Canterbury.  Chippinghouse Road, Stead Road, Brookfield Road and St Ronan’s Road at Abbeydale were laid out on the grounds of the mansion.

John died after a carriage accident when driving with his daughter to Baslow, and the horse reared up and threw him to the ground outside Tyzack’s Dam, now the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, in 1869.  His wife Ellen died the same year.