Sorry once again to have missed the ‘one a week’ post target – I have a post in the making, which I am currently writing, but it will need a day or so more to do. My excuse this time was preparing for a job interview… which, incidentally, I got. Hurrah! I wont say what as that would give the game away as to who I am, but suffice to say I am gainfully employed in the services of a local museum, at least on a part-time basis. This allows me to continue working with the Blackden Trust, as well as spending time with my wonderful, if exhausting, son.
So, all is good in Hamnett-shire!
No, the main reason for this post is that the ever wonderful Glossop Heritage people have posted some amazing images of the Whitfield Well Dressing – see them here. These are truly amazing, and really show the size of the event as it once was.
I am really quite serious about restarting the well dressing as a new tradition – it has been stopped and restarted on a number of occasions previously, so this is nothing new. I would love to get that number of people involved, with maybe music, dancing, entertainments, food, stalls, etc. a real carnival atmosphere – although, ideally, without the traditional bull baiting, cock fighting, and prize bare-knuckle boxing.
I took a photograph this evening of roughly the same scene as the middle right or bottom left of the lower set of photographs. The original photograph must have been taken from on high, perhaps an upstairs window or something, which means it can’t be replicated properly – but it gives the impression.
Compare and imagine… Let’s do this!
I have more information to add about the well dressing, but all in good time. Anyway, enjoy this until I can get something else published.
Welcome to the first post of the blog, and I thought I’d start with a subject (very, for me) close to home: Whitfield Well.
Situated on Whitfield Cross, halfway up on the right hand side, and set back from the road in a paved and ‘cobbled’ area. It is, I think, the overlooked star of the Whitfield Conservation Area. It is also a Grade II listed feature, and the description in the listing is far better and more concise than mine would be, so here it is:
Name: WHITFIELD WELL List entry Number: 1384307 Location: WHITFIELD WELL, WHITFIELD CROSS National Grid Reference: SK 03620 93405 County: Derbyshire District: High Peak Grade: II Date first listed: 27-Jan-1978
Summary of Building: Well. Mid C18, restored C20. Tooled slabs of gritstone. L-shaped series of rectangular troughs enclosing spring water along 2 sides, with moulded stone dams at intervals, and stone table above part of trough to east side. To rear of wells 2 sections of rubble walling with coping, that to north side partly rebuilt. East side has stone buttress. Third side bounded by stone wall of adjoining industrial yard.
So there you go. But there is a lot more to it that just that dry description.
It is a spring fed perpetual well, meaning that flows in even the most severe droughts. Indeed, its heavy flow once supplied the houses hereabouts with their drinking water, even after most other houses were plumbed into the mains. Because of its importance, it was, for a long time, the focus of a well dressing. Well dressings are justifiably famous and important aspects of the folk calendar of Derbyshire and parts of Staffordshire, and are probably a continuation, however distant, of the pagan veneration of the god or goddess of the water there. This same reverence of wells such this led to them being named, in the Christian period, after saints, though this too fell out of favour in the post-reformation period. We have no idea about the attribution of the well in either the pagan or Christian periods, but a well such as this would surely have had one.
The well dressing at Whitfield was an important and rather grand affair, and seems to have coincided with the wakes week (early September), and the rush bearing ceremony at the Whitfield parish church, St James’. This involved a special blessing of the well by the vicar of St James’, and the creation of a rush cart to take the rushes to the church, where they would be used as flooring. The rush cart and celebratory archway and bunting can be seen in this (c.1920) photograph taken at the junction of Gladstone Street, and looking up Whitfield Cross.
The Well Dressing arch, with the rush cart underneath. Note the shadowy chimney visible in the sky behind the arch at the right.
The building at the extreme left of the photograph is the Roebuck Inn (now a private residence), where the Well Dressing Committee would meet to discuss that year’s celebrations. Apparently, this well was the only one in Derbyshire to be decorated with heather gathered from the surrounding moorland, though Hamnett (the actual historian, not my pseudonym) mentions it being “beautifully decorated with flowers and shrubs” Incidentally, Hamnett also believed that theWhitfield cross, the one that gave the name to the road, originally stood here at the well. More recent work has placed its original site at the top of the road, at the junction with Hague Street – which makes more sense. The cross will be the subject of a later blog post.
The same view today, some has changed, but it is still recognizable.
When the well dressing died out, and why, is not clear; there is online a photograph of the 1976 well dressing fancy dress competition winners, so it continued until at least then (click here). One suspects, though, that by then it had lost some of the wonderful Victorian seriousness that the committee would have brought to it.
The water from the well also supplied a Brewery for a time. This was a two-storied building adjacent to the wells, and built in 1849 by James Robinson (who also built the Surrey Arms on Victoria Street, as well as many other houses and building hereabouts). The Whitfield Brewing Company seems never to have been successful, and it changed hands numerous times, eventually ending up as a steam laundry at the end of the 19th Century, before being demolished in the late 40s or early 50s and the area used as a builder’s yard. Finally, houses were built on the site. The tall square chimney of the brewery can just about be seen in background of the photo above – it is also marked on the 1975 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map, although I can’t believe it stood that long. There is a good, if short, history of the brewery here. Incidentally, the 1968 OS map shows a phone box at the western end of the well area.
Here are some photographs.
The well bench. Not sure what the original purpose of the bench was – perhaps a table for those using the well? The spring rises from below the bench and flows to the right along the troughs.There are two holes in the kerb below the bench a uniform distance apart – possibly the remains of a railing? The iron and lead affair at the bottom of the photo is a staple that joins two kerb stones together; there are several of them around the length of the well.The water troughs; the stone ‘dams’ are visible amongst the pond weed.The water disappears under the stone at the end, there, reemerging in a drain to the right.More evidence for railings – Victorian or earlier in date with the lead packing.The capped well that originally stood in the brewery yard.The drain, covered by a Victorian cast iron grid, where the Whitfield water ends up.The view from the well onto Whitfield Cross.
I went out last week and cleared the site up a bit. The well is a hangout for the local youth, and inevitably mess and litter accumulate (ranging from coke cans… to a scooter!). So I swept up and dredged the troughs for rubbish… my good deed for the week. Amongst the detritus were four interesting bits – three pottery sherds and a piece of glass.
I say interesting, but I realise that interesting is an entirely subjective word!
The two sherds on the right are white glazed fairly boring bits – bowls or plates probably, and late 19th or 20th century in date. One is a transfer-printed glazed rim of a plate roughly 12cm in diameter, and again late 19th or early 20th century in date. The glass fragment is from the neck of a bottle, possibly a mineral water bottle, or a beer bottle, perhaps. The bluey-green aquamarine tinge allows me to give it a date of… yep, you guessed it 19th or early 20th century. Many mass produced Victorian bottles are of this colour, the result of iron and other impurities in the sand used to make them, and it disappears in the early 20th century.
The pottery. Not quite Roman, but ‘interesting’ enough.
It would seem, then, that leaving litter at the well was a Victorian habit too. It is odd that they survived on the setts for so long, though. Perhaps they eroded out of the surrounding soil? And talking of Victorian habits, Neville Sharpe, in his book ‘Crosses of the Peak District’ notes that there was “an ancient practice in Whitfield township of local youths throwing strangers into the wells”.
If anyone has any information relating to the well, and especially if corrections are needed, please email me or you can drop a comment in the box below.
I should mention here that I am currently making plans to reinstate the tradition of well dressing at Whitfield Wells. I would be very keen to hear from anyone who wants to join in, who remembers them from when they were originally going, or who has any old photographs or other detail relating to the well dressing.
I have big plans, but can’t do it on my own! Drop me a line with anything you want to say, or leave a comment below.
The Glossop Cabinet of Curiosities 