The first documentary reference to the village does not appear until Robert de Herthill held a house and land in Catcliffe for which he paid an annual rent of 10s (£0.50) to Gervase de Bernack of Treeton. From the Bernacks, Catcliffe passed to the Furnivals, lords of Hallamshire from whom it descended to the Dukes of Norfolk.
A 1649 rental of the estates of Earls of Pembroke (then lords of Hallamshire) records the tenants at Catcliffe, the most important being George Oake, Margaret Jarvis and Thomas Revell.
Catcliffe remained a small, agricultural settlement until the 19th century, the one intrusion of industry being the construction of a glass furnace in the 18th century. The furnace was built in 1740 by William Fenney.
He had married the daughter of the owner of the Bolsterstone Glassworks but had been thwarted in his efforts to expand the works there and set up on his own account at Catcliffe. He was probably attracted to the site by the easy availability of coal and the opening of the Don Navigation to Rotherham which offered economic transport of the finished product to market.
The Catcliffe works had two cones or furnaces. In 1759 the works was taken over by the May family who were succeeded by Blunn and Booth in 1833. The glassworks closed in 1884 although there was a short-lived revival in 1901. One of the Catcliffe cones survives, one of only four to have survived out of over 100 glass cones that were constructed in Britain during the 18th century. The cone was purchased by Rotherham Rural District Council in the 1960s and old peoples bungalows were later built on the surrounding land. For visiting information, see the 
Catcliffe Glass Cone page
The population of the township remained small. It was 135 in 1801 and increased only slowly throughout the 19th century, reaching 273 in 1851 and 352 in 1891. The decade between 1891 and 1901 saw Catcliffe population expand to 1,232. The reason for this expansion can be found in the development of collieries in surrounding parishes and the sinking of the High Hazels Colliery was later the subject of extensive opencast mining. At one time in the 1980s the Waverley opencast site was proposed as a potential helicopter landing ground or airport but the scheme failed because the National Coal Board wished to continue mining on the site. Plans for a local airport at Tinsley Park surfaced once more in the late 1980s. This was met with a mixed reception in Catcliffe as the village would be directly under the flight-path.
The railway came to Catcliffe in 1900 with the opening of the Sheffield District Railway between Treeton Junction and Brighton Junction. The station at Catcliffe survived until September 1939 when the whole line closed.
Sheffield Parkway, joining the M1 with the centre of Sheffield, passes to the north of Catcliffe. Co-operative Retail Services opened a Homeworld superstore on land just off the Parkway in 1990.
Catcliffe was a township within the ecclesiastical parish of Rotherham. As such it did not have its own church and the inhabitants probably attended the chapel at Tinsley. The first place of worship within the village was the Wesleyan Chapel, opened in 1869. A new Methodist chapel was erected in 1906. A temporary iron Anglican Church, St Faith’s, was erected in 1895. Catcliffe became part of the new parish of Brinsworth in 1903, and a new permanent church, St Mary’s, was erected in 1910.
The population of Catcliffe reached a peak at 2,048 in 1951. It than began to fall, reaching 1,671 in 1981 and 1,392 in 1991.
(Extracted from:- R.M.B.C, Patchwork of parishes, 1997)
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