Oldcotes Dyke is the name of the final section of a river system that drains parts of north Nottinghamshire and the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England. Historically, it has supported milling, with seven water mills drawing their power from its water, and ran through the grounds of the Cistercian Roche Abbey. It is a tributary of the River Ryton.
Route
The river begins as a small stream near the contour and close to the B6093 Moor Lane South road at Ravenfield. If flows to the east, forming the southern boundary of the housing of the village, with open land on its south bank. It passes under Priests Bridge on Lidget Lane, and is briefly culverted as it flows under the M18 motorway and Hellaby Lane, to the north of Hellaby. It forms the eastern boundary of Hellaby Industrial Park. It runs beside a dismantled railway embankment, and is joined by an unnamed stream which also rises to the west of the M18 motorway. A little further to the south, Hellaby Bridge carries the A631 Rotherham to Bawtry road over the combined flow, and it is joined by Newhall Dike, which rises at Cum Well, further west but to the east of the motorway.
The river turns to the east, flowing along the southern edge of Maltby, to be joined by Kingsforth Brook. This rises besides Second Lane in Wickersley. Heading east it passes through King's Pond Plantation, a wood with a large pond in it, and under the motorway. It passes under Kingsforth Lane and Newhall Lane before turning to the north-east, to join Hellaby Dike. Shortly after passing under Carr Lane, Maltby, it turns to the south, and becomes Maltby Dike. The first of the historic mills on the river is Hooton Levitt mill. The farmhouse and attached mill building date from the late 18th century, but were rebuilt in the mid-19th century, and are Grade II listed structures. The wheelpit remains, but the breast-shot water wheel and associated machinery are no longer there. It was marked as a corn mill on the 1892 map, It was still marked as such in 1929, when there was a sewage treatment works with sludge beds, medier beds and storm lagoons just below it. The works was owned by the Maltby Urban District Council (UDC), but has since been removed. In 2007 Severn Trent Water, the successors to Maltby UDC, applied to turn the site into a hay meadow and grassland, when it would become part of the Maltby Low Common nature reserve.
Heading south-east, the river is crossed by the to Doncaster freight railway. Beyond it, on the southern bank, is the new sewage treatment works owned by Severn Trent Water. It is strung out along the river, hemmed in by the steep sides of the valley, until Sheep Wash bridge at Gypsy Lane is reached. Beyond the bridge are the grounds of Roche Abbey. The Cistercian Abbey was founded in 1147, and Sandbeck was granted to the community in 1241. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, the abbey was sold as a monastic manor. The Saunderson family gradually bought the components of the estate in the later 16th and early 17th centuries. Roche was bought by Nicholas Saunderson, 1st Viscount Castleton in 1627. The estate passed to Sir Thomas Lumley in 1723, and his son, Richard Lumley-Saunderson, 4th Earl of Scarbrough employed the landscape architect Capability Brown to landscape the estate in 1760. The Sandbeck estate is still privately owned, although the ruins of the abbey are managed by English Heritage. Of all the Cistercian monasteries in England, the ground plan at Roche is one of the most complete, and despite much of the complex being dismantled after the dissolution of 1538, the early gothic transepts survive, and are some of the finest examples of the style in Britain.