Things to do in South Yorkshire

Sheffield Botanical Gardens are a beautifully maintained Victorian pleasure garden occupying nearly 20 acres in the residential suburb of Broomhill, less than two kilometres from the city centre. Opened to the public in 1836 by the Sheffield Botanical and Horticultural Society, they represent one of the finest surviving examples of early Victorian landscape garden design in the north of England and provide a peaceful, richly planted refuge within easy reach of the city. The gardens were designed by Robert Marnock, a leading Victorian landscape gardener who adopted the gardenesque style then being advocated by John Claudius Loudon, an approach that emphasised the careful arrangement of plants to display each species to best individual advantage rather than creating an overall landscape effect. This produced a style of garden where paths wind through a series of distinct plant collections, each presented in well-designed settings that allow individual plants to be appreciated and studied as well as enjoyed aesthetically. The most architecturally significant feature is the range of three classical pavilions at the garden's northern boundary, Grade II listed structures designed in the Ionic style that originally served as conservatories for tender and exotic plants. These elegant buildings were restored between 2003 and 2012 at considerable cost and now house subtropical plants and cacti in their temperature-controlled interiors, functioning as they always did as display houses for plants that cannot survive the Sheffield climate outdoors. The plant collections at Sheffield Botanical Gardens reflect over 180 years of horticultural development and include a National Collection of Weigela as well as significant collections of ornamental grasses, roses, heathers and rare trees. The bear pit, a curious Victorian feature that originally housed a bear as a visitor attraction, has been repurposed as a sunken garden. The woodland section of the garden provides seasonal interest through spring bulbs and the autumn colour of mature specimen trees. Entry to the gardens is free throughout the year, making them one of the best value attractions in Sheffield. Events including outdoor theatre, flower shows and family activities take place throughout the year.

Conisbrough Castle is located in the town of Conisbrough near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England. The most impressive feature of the ruins is the hundred foot high circular keep supported by six buttresses giving it a star shaped cross section - it is one of the finest and most unusual Norman keeps in England. The keep is at the eastern side of a central courtyard surrounded by a curtain wall. The southern part of the wall has now collapsed. The gateway is on the south side of the courtyard. Along the north side of the courtyard are remains of a number of buildings including the Great Hall, buttery, kitchens and bake house. Along the east side of the courtyard are the remains of the accommodation blocks and the Great Chamber. Restoration work on the keep commenced in 1992, and a wooden roof and internal floors were rebuilt. The castle re-opened to the public in 1995. The castle now has a visitors centre with audio visual displays. Conisbrough Castle is one of South Yorkshire's main tourist attractions. It 1988 operation of the site was taken over by The Ivanhoe Trust under a management agreement between English Heritage and Doncaster Council who own the land. In April 2008 day-to-day operation of the site was handed back to English Heritage. The first castle on the site was built by William de Warenne, the first Earl of Surrey (son-in-law of William the Conqueror). The original castle was probably a motte and bailey design built around 1070. The present castle was built by Hamelin Plantagenet, the fifth Earl Warenne. The cylindrical stone keep of the castle was built around 1180. King John, the nephew of Hamelin, stayed at the castle in 1201. The stone curtain walls were built not long after the keep. The other stone buildings within the bailey may been added in the early 13th century. The Warenne ownership of the castle ended with John was thus the eighth and last Earl Warenne, when it was seized by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster in 1316 in retaliation for Earl John abducting Lancaster's wife Alice. Lancaster did not last long in Conisbrough, though - in 1322 he led a rebellion against the King Edward II. Lancaster was captured and found guilty of treason, then executed outside the walls of his castle at Pontefract. Conisbrough was then held by Edward II until 1326 when it was handed back to John de Warenne in 1326 and died heirless in 1347. Conisbrough reverted to the Crown and Edward III conferred the estate on his youngest son Edmund and his family who held it until 1446. The castle then passed to Richard Duke of York, then to his son who in 1461 became Edward IV. By the end of the 15th century, Conisbrough was falling into disrepair. By the time of Henry VIII, records from 1538 show that the gates of the castle, the bridge, and about 55m of wall between the tower and the gate had collapsed, and one floor of the keep had fallen in. The remains of the castle were granted by Henry VIII to the Carey family. During the Civil War of the seventeenth century (1642-1651) when many other English castles were destroyed or damaged, Conisbrough Castle was left untouched because the gate and walls had already partly collapsed. It was bought by Conisbrough local council in the 1940s, and is now in the care of English Heritage. The Arts "Coningsburgh Castle" in the Sir Walter Scott novel, Ivanhoe, is based on Conisbrough Castle. Conisbrough Castle Conisbrough Castle Keep. Gatehouse, Conisbrough Castle

Brodsworth Hall is a remarkably well-preserved Victorian country house located near the village of Brodsworth, just a few miles northwest of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. Managed by English Heritage, it stands as one of the most complete examples of a Victorian country house in England, not because it was lovingly restored to its original glory, but because it was allowed to quietly decline for much of the twentieth century before being rescued. This peculiar history of benign neglect has paradoxically made it one of the most authentic Victorian interiors in the country, preserving layers of accumulated life that deliberate restoration would likely have erased. It is a place that rewards visitors who enjoy the texture of real history rather than the polished artificiality of a museum reconstruction. The current hall was built between 1861 and 1863 for Charles Sabine Augustus Thellusson, replacing an earlier Georgian house on the same estate. It was designed in an Italianate style, and its construction was made possible by the enormous Thellusson inheritance — a fortune tied up in a notorious legal case, the Thellusson Act, which had wound through the courts for decades following the death of Peter Thellusson in 1797. Peter had attempted to leave his wealth to accumulate across multiple generations, a scheme so alarming to Parliament that it prompted the Thellusson Act of 1800 to prevent similar arrangements in future. When the fortune was finally released, it was considerably diminished by legal costs, but still sufficient to fund the building of a grand new house. The Thellusson family and their descendants, latterly the Grant-Daltons, occupied the hall until 1990, when the last family member handed it over to English Heritage. What makes Brodsworth Hall so compelling as a historical document is the way it was lived in rather than curated. The family continued to inhabit it through the twentieth century, making do as finances permitted, patching and layering rather than restoring. By the time English Heritage received it, the house contained not a single frozen moment in time but a palimpsest of Victorian, Edwardian, and mid-twentieth-century domestic life. The wallpapers were peeling, the paintwork was faded, and some of the furniture was worn through — and English Heritage made the courageous decision to preserve this state of "arrested decay" rather than strip it back and start again. This approach, unusual among heritage properties, gives the house an atmosphere of haunting intimacy that pristinely restored houses rarely achieve. Physically, the hall is a substantial stone building of honey-coloured limestone, with a formal entrance front featuring a columned portico and symmetrical wings. Inside, the rooms are furnished largely as they were in the Victorian period, with the original carpets, curtains, ceramics, and taxidermy still in place. The famous collection of marble statuary, acquired partly from a Chevalier Solaroli — an Italian nobleman who had assembled a significant collection — fills the house with pale, slightly melancholy figures that gaze from niches and pedestals. The overall atmosphere is one of faded grandeur: a house that has grown old gracefully, wearing its years openly rather than hiding them. The gardens at Brodsworth are equally significant and have been more actively restored to their Victorian character. Covering around fifteen acres, they include formal pleasure grounds with a Target Range garden (an unusual survival of a Victorian game garden where guests shot at moving targets), a rose garden, a rock garden, a quarry garden, and broad lawns with specimen trees. The gardens are maintained in period style by English Heritage gardeners using traditional methods, and they have a lush, slightly theatrical quality that was entirely typical of Victorian horticultural ambition. In spring and summer, the flower borders and the walled kitchen garden are particularly beautiful, and the surrounding parkland gives the whole ensemble a sense of spacious seclusion that is remarkable given how close the site lies to a large industrial and urban conurbation. The surrounding landscape is a gentle patchwork of South Yorkshire countryside, with agricultural land and former mining villages forming the context. Doncaster itself is only about five miles to the southeast, and the wider area reflects the complex industrial and post-industrial character of this part of England. Despite this proximity to urban development, the Brodsworth estate feels genuinely rural, sheltered by mature trees and surrounded by parkland. The village of Brodsworth itself is quiet and small, and there are pleasant walks in the vicinity. The broader region contains other heritage attractions including Conisbrough Castle, a dramatic twelfth-century Norman keep of national importance that lies only a few miles to the southwest. For visitors planning a trip, Brodsworth Hall is open seasonally, typically from spring through to autumn, though the gardens often have extended opening. English Heritage members enter free of charge. The site is located off a minor road between Brodsworth village and the A635, and there is a car park on site. Public transport access is limited — the nearest railway station is at Adwick on the East Midlands Railway line, roughly two miles away, making a car or taxi the most practical option for most visitors. The hall is not fully accessible to all visitors due to its historic structure, but English Heritage has made efforts to improve ground-floor and garden access. The best times to visit are late spring and early summer when the gardens are at their most spectacular, or autumn when the house's melancholy beauty seems especially fitting. One of the more unusual and touching details of Brodsworth is the servants' quarters and working spaces, which survive in a remarkable state of completeness. The laundry, game larder, and other service areas still contain their original equipment and fittings, offering an unusually detailed picture of the domestic economy of a Victorian house of this scale. Unlike the grand rooms, which were designed to impress, these spaces were purely functional, and their survival is largely accidental — nobody thought them worth changing, so they simply remained. There is also a small but engaging exhibition about the Thellusson inheritance story, which has all the ingredients of a Victorian sensation novel: an eccentric will, parliamentary outrage, decades of litigation, and a fortune that shrank dramatically in the winning. The house that eventually rose from this legal drama is a fitting monument to the whole improbable story.