Marsh Lane Crosspool Natural (Hot) Springs?

[ThemWotDays]

I have a very vague memory as a young child of being shown (for all of one minute) some kind of muddy spring between Crosspool and Crookes. This would have been about 1979-1981. It wasn’t until I was a bit older and saw some TV pictures of foreign hot springs in grey mud (I think in New Zealand) that I understood what I had been looking at that day.

Is my memory playing tricks on me? If there were hot springs or geysers in Crookes we’d all know about it surely?!!

As I recall we were on a school trip to the Headland Road cemetery, when an allotment holder got chatting to our teacher. Some moments later we were invited by the teacher to follow this gentleman through a locked gate into his allotment (which must have adjoined the cemetery – hence me assuming it was in the Marsh Lane allotments, possibly the other cluster nearer Clough Fields, but I think we were near the chapel building when we were led away so I think more likely the former location). The allotment was fenced off with closed boards up to at least 6 ft high so this site wouldn’t be visible to the public; I can’t remember whether, once through the gate, it was the first allotment or whether we has to follow a short path through a couple of others to get to the one in question.

I know that I didn’t imagine being told by our teacher that this was a spring, and I can definitely remeber seeing somthing bubbling in the mud. But I’ve never found anything on old maps or heard anyone else mention it, so I wonder if it was more like a fractured drain or something eaually unremarable? I think the idea of it being a steaming hot geothermal spring is my boyhood imagination running away with itself.

What is interesting is that the old St Antony’s Well is not that far from here, effectively on the same headland; so there is a precedent for water coming out of the ground in this vicinity.

[Guest harestone]

Pretty sure there was a thread on Sheffield forum regarding springs in that area. I can't search for it as being so late the forum is closed for maintenance.

[Bayleaf]

Quite the opposite really but there's also Coldwell Lane above Crosspool that takes its name from a well in the area.

[hilldweller]

I used to live on St. Anthonys Road, near the hairpin bend.
Right on the apex of the bend is a "gennel" which leads through onto Clough Fields. If you walk through this gennel into the field you will see a man-hole cover beside the path. Beneath the cover water can be heard rushing. If you turn right and walk down the field the spring breaks the surface and flows down a little valley through some old gardens and crosses the road and down through Reaps Wood (Three Ups Wood) to Rivelin Valley Road.
I think that this spring, like the St. Anthonys Well one further along, rises in the flat plateau where the Marsh Lane Allotments are.
There are also springs rising under the houses on the top side of St. Anthonys near the gennel. These used to cause problems flowing down the hairpin bend and freezing in winter until the council built a gutter on the inner edge of the pavement
I think the nearest hot spring to Sheffield is the one that feeds the ( roman ? ) bath house in Stoney Middleton.
Quite something to see steam rising when there's snow on the ground and it's freezing. It's near the church.

HD