Manchester Road, Sheffield, S6 5SP

Former water-powered grinding Wheel/water mgmt sys

Remains of small waterpowered grinding wheel. One of the Rivelin Waterpower Sites.

Uppermost Wheel was described as newly built in 1751, and as a grinding wheel, but it is not known what products where ground there. By 1799 the tenant was George Woollen, also tenant of Rivelin Mill. In 1845 the wheel was described as ‘now pulled down’.

The dam outfall appears to have fed directly into the head goit of Rivelin Mill, the same weir serving both sites (based on the diagram in Ball, Crossley and Flavell, Water Power on the Sheffield Rivers, Second Edition, South Yorkshire Industrial History Society 2006).

There is no public access to the site, which lies south of Manchester Road about 300m upstream of Rivelin Mill Bridge, and is the property of Yorkshire Water Authority. The site is overgrown, and the dam can be traced only by isolated stones. At the lower end of the dam are what may be the ruins of a wheel pit set approximately at a right angle to the river.

Uppermost Wheel is one of the 20 water-powered mills built in the Rivelin Valley (search for ‘Rivelin Waterpower Sites’ on this website for more details). This sequence of Rivelin mills and mill dams forms an essential part of Sheffield’s heritage. They also have a broader national and even international significance in relation to the history of the Industrial Revolution in Sheffield.

Further information and pictures of Wolf Wheel and other sites in the Rivelin valley can be found at https://rivelinvalley.org.uk/rivelin-trails-2/. See also the books ‘Walking the Rivelin’, by Sue Shaw and Keith Kendall (6th edition, 2019, Rivelin Valley Conservation Group) and ‘Water Power on the Sheffield Rivers’, by C. Ball, D. Crossley, N. Flavell (Editors), (2nd Edition (2006), South Yorkshire Industrial Society).