Moorgate put-in (Rotherham)

Above Forge Island the river and the navigation separate, with the navigation carried through a sequence of lock cuts — Jordans, Holmes, Ickles and Rotherham — that bypass the river's own weirs before the two rejoin downstream. The channel was deepened in 1983 to take 700-tonne barges, so it runs broad, deep and walled rather than as a shallow natural river.

Masbrough Weir stands on the river by Forge Island and carries a fish pass; Jordans Weir sits further upstream, beside the lock cut. Chantry Bridge, a late-15th-century stone arch bridge carrying a chapel on its span, crosses the Don in the town centre and is both Grade I listed and a Scheduled Monument. The navigation still carries commercial traffic: a tanker barge delivers lubricant oil from Hull to a wharf on this reach roughly weekly.

Water quality on this stretch has recovered from its industrial past, with herons, ducks and salmon on the river, and fish passes on local weirs, including Masbrough, helping salmon move through. Centenary Riverside, an urban wetland nature park created on the Don corridor as part of flood-defence and biodiversity work, lies along the wider river corridor at Rotherham.