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Pre-Roman Rotherham
It has to be said that the area covered by the Borough of
Rotherham did not figure largely in ancient times. There is little known of the history of Rotherham in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages; an odd burial place here, the shadows and
post holes of some small fort or farmstead there.
Well most of them could not read and write in those days, let alone use a computer!
The last glaciation retreated from these parts around 10,000BC and some time after that the Tribe of Man must have followed the animals north into the new pastures. Men must then have lived in caves in the area but there is little evidence. There are no great cave paintings, no exquisite carvings. Flint was worked on Canklow Hill during the Stone Age but I have to confess here that I am no expert on the arcane science of dating flint axeheads. I have no ideas for how many millennia or few years the knappers used this site. There are no stone monuments; no henges great or small, no menhirs, no fields of stone from the heydays of Avebury and Stonehenge.
As for the roads, these were footpaths along the ridgeways - the spines of hills - thereby avoiding the heavily forested areas along the valleys, and attacks from wild beasts and even wilder men. There appear to have been at least three ridgeway routes converging near the present day Rotherham where there was a ford across the Rover Don (about the site of the present Chantry Bridge). One of these was the ancient Rykenild Way (also called Ricknild Street) which in pre-Roman times ran along the route of the present day Moorgate to cross the Don in Rotherham.
There was a complex of farmsteads which archaeologist think were inhibited from the Bronze Age through to the Romano-British period in Canklow Woods on a site now partly covered in part by Oakwood School Playing Fields and Rotherham Hospital. These were stockaded settlements with fields enclosed by banks and ditches. Now I've know this area pretty well since I was twelve or thereabouts, and between you, me and the gatepost, the uninitiated would never know our ancient ancestors had a fairly substantial settlement here. The soil is thin, poor and sandy: you wouldn't have got much of a crop from it. So they must have grown their crops further afield and used this as a safe store or for livestock. The area was also deeply wooded until the Twentieth Century so the inhabitants may well have got their living felling and dressing wood. Many maps also show an ancient footpath or hollowgate which climbs up from Canklow Road along the northern edge of the remaining woodland and going out onto Moorgate through what are now the Thomas Rotherham College playing fields. This would have passed right by the settlement and carried on over Broom Valley and what is now Herringthorpe Playing Fields to Valley Park before turning south and east to the Brecks and beyond. It was notable enough to appear on maps as late as 1840 but has now disappeared under later development.
Two thousand years or more ago Rotherham probably consisted of a small stockaded settlement of mud huts and most people earned their living by farming the surrounding fields. Doubtless there was an alehouse or three for the fleecing of weary travellers. Given that the area has plenty of iron ore, it is likely that iron was smelted and forged hereabouts as soon as the technology reached these dim, northern parts.
Archaeological remains are small or have completely disappeared under later developments. There are no Celtic chariot burials here, no silver cauldrons dedicated to Cernunnos, no caches of amber. There are, I suppose, the remains of burial mounds and rubbish dumps. Stop to reflect that a large part of our knowledge of the ordinary lives of our ancestors has been gleaned from such salubrious places. Caesar's Camp in Scholes Coppice is actually an Iron Age fort which is a Scheduled Designated Ancient Monument. Unless you know what you're looking for it looks much like a random array of banks and ditches. There is the remains of a large Iron Age fort and settlement at Wincobank just over the border in Sheffield. I will confess that I have never visited here and don't know if there is much to see or if it has mostly disappeared under housing estates.