Penistone is a small market town 8 miles west of Barnsley

Penistone, 750 feet up in the Pennines beside the River Don. Penistone town has over a thousand years of recorded history encompassing agriculture, weaving, steel making and the railways. It even has a type of cloth and breed of sheep named after it!

Penistone probably derives from the Old English words penn meaning hill and tun meaning village or farm; so ‘hill village’ would seem an appropriate description. The district has probably been occupied since before Roman times, but is first mentioned after the Norman Conquest. It seems to have been razed to the ground in 1069-70 during William I’s scorched earth subjugation of Yorkshire known as The Harrying of the North. The settlement appears as Pengeston and Pangeston in the Domesday Book of 1086 where it is recorded that it was a waste of very little taxable value.

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Barnsley, in the Heart of Yorkshire

Barnsley people have a great deal of respect for their old market town. Of that there can be no doubt.

Barnsley is a place with a history crafted by hard-working people. It is a place that stands no nonsense, with a style that like its people, says loud and clear – here I am take me for what I am. Barnsley’s very structure and architecture is as frank and straightforward as its populace.

Outside Barnsley the town has an image that has until very recently, emphasised the negative rather than the positive. Relatively high levels of unemployment, unsatisfactory educational performance levels and pockets of deprivation. Old fashioned buildings and unsatisfactory 70’s era “improvements”. Hit by the virtual disappearance of a mining industry on which much of Barnsley’s 19th and 20th century development was founded, and prominent on the borough’s coat of arms, it has taken time for structural change to take place. The closure of local pits one after another and the knock-on effect on suppliers and shop-keepers was a massive psychological blow to communities built on hard graft and local solidarity.

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Lundwood is a busy suburb of Barnsley three miles north east of the town centre.

Before the 1920’s Lundwood was a predominantly rural locality and site of the ruins of Monk Bretton Priory.

Lundwood probably derives from a combination of the Old Norse and Icelandic words lundr meaning ‘sacred woodland grove’ or ‘thickly wooded’ and wud meaning ‘to bury’ or ‘soil’. Indeed when Cluniac monks first came to build their monastery near the north bank of the River Dearne in 1153 the whole area was probably densely forested. Lund Wood, a half mile square remnant of this primeval forest, was still standing east of the present day suburb until felled for timber during World War I.

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