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Hooton Roberts
High town or settlement or Hill town or hoo in Saxon times could also meant
house and Roberts was presumably the name of the one time owner. The village is indeed up at the top of the hill and largely consists of some very nice old and refurbished property if
you can stand the traffic on the busy Doncaster Road that cuts right through it. In the Seventeenth Century the widow of the famous Earl of Strafford, chief councillor to Charles I
lived here after his betrayal by the king and subsequent execution. The Countess was buried there under the altar steps of Hooton Roberts Church when she died. In the 1900s workmen
found three skeletons there, one of an elderly woman, one of a child, and one of a man with the bones of his neck cut through - so it seems that the widow had brought her husband's
remains home.
There is a church dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the old manor house, some lovely old converted farm buildings and the Earl of Strafford public house. Down the road towards Kilnhurst are the remains of quarries, an area marked on my map as Common Plantation which I am sure has signs up saying it is a nature reserve. On the other side of the road are the Rotherham United Training Ground, Hooton Lodge (now a restaurant) and another sign I'd not noticed until a recently Elm Tree Farm Fisheries.