Gresford Wells | Curious Clwyd

The Wells of Clwyd

The Gresford Wells

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of fresh water to a community. When the lack of available clean water was something that could only be appreciated at a distance, through the medium of television news reports from this African country or that, we rested easily on our ability to turn on a tap and fill a glass or leave the tap running as we brushed our teeth. But perhaps we are beginning to appreciate it a bit more - perhaps in this age of private water companies increasing their profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer and our filthy rivers, worshipping at the altar of the greedy god of dividend payments, we are starting to see just how vital a clean source of water is to us. Perhaps now we can appreciate just how fundamental. Perhaps now we can appreciate how our ancestors felt about an ever-flowing spring in their midst, how they settled by its free flowing waters. Is it any wonder that so many gods and goddesses were born to us from water?

Not all wells are holy. Not all wells were venerated for their miraculous, curative powers. Most wells were altogether more wonderfully simple, but their importance is often remembered in the infrastructure about them, in later dedications and tradition. And the wells of Gresford are just such wells.(1)

Some fifteen steps lead down to the later curved corridor which ends at the much obscured well head.

Edward Lhuyd tells of four wells in Gresford Parish, of which only All Saints on Springfield Lane, beneath the railway, is in the village proper. It is clear that this well was a considerable concern, since it is accessed by a flight of fifteen steps which lead to a later, short, stone lined and curved corridor. It is now quite overgrown, and near completely hidden away by bramble, nettle and scrub - but it’s there still, in the green. There can be little doubt that this well was the primary source of fresh water for the village.

The Royal Commission, visiting in 1911, was in no doubt that the well on Springfield Lane was Lhuyd’s Ffynnon Holh Seint. The well was still the Village’s primary source of fresh water, though by the time of their visit, the waters were mechanically pumped up the considerable hill to a number of more convenient outlets, one of which remains on the corner of Old Wrexham Road. But there remains a tad of confusion here, since in writings of the later 19th century, it would seem the well on Springfield Lane was also known as St Catherine’s Well.

Why this would be the case is unknown. Lhuyd makes no mention at all of a St Catherine’s Well in the Parish, and it is unlikely that he would not have been informed if such a well existed. The presence of a path leading almost directly to the All Saints' church is also, I think, telling. The Church has a St Catherine’s Chapel, of course, and it is perhaps this that led to the renaming of the well. There is a tradition that All Saints’ was a place of pilgrimage - did the villagers believe that St Catherine was the object of this ancient veneration and retrospectively assign her the well as a consequence? Still, I am of a mind to accept the robust confidence of the Royal Commission in assigning the well on Springfield Lane (the name itself is telling) as All Saints’ - one and the same with St Catherine’s Well, which would then seem to have been a later renaming.

But All Saints’ is not the only extant well in Gresford, though it goes unmentioned by Lhuyd. Discussed in some depth on the Well Hopper site, it lies some 500m south west of Springfield Lane, along a public footpath that follows and finally runs beneath the railway line. Here are to be found the tremendously enigmatic remains of a near completely obscured spring, within what would seem to be a stone canopied and lined basin and hidden away almost entirely within the roots of the trees that have grown about it and perhaps two centuries of silt. Given its situation, on a slope beneath the Parsonage, and for want of any other known name, it seems apt to name it after its near neighbour - The Parsonage Well.

It was an effort to find, though the directions in the Well Hopper site were excellent. The most recent photos of the well were well over a decade old, and nature had done its best in the intervening time to swallow it away. But the run of water remains profound, and water will always find a way - indeed, the flow has found a way beneath the railway, and its run off has been landscaped to the north of the line. After some scrambling and wincing at bramble lash and nettle rash, it was clear enough to study.

The initials seem clear - the inscribed date beneath less so.

The canopy is virtually the only part of the man-made harnessing of the well that remains visible, and there was a thrill there to discover this hidden thing, to witness the approaching triumph of nature in reclaiming what was once its own. And wonderfully, the canopy is inscribed, though time has made the reading somewhat difficult - difficult, but not impossible.

The initials A: E: M: N are actually clear enough, and there is what seems to be the faint traces of a date below - 1818, perhaps, possibly 1819? But for who or what were these initials inscribed? The close proximity of the Parsonage is key. Here, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Newcomes were resident. Henry Newcome was vicar of Gresford between 1764 and 1803, and with Elizabeth Newcome, née Hughes fathered five children, Elizabeth, Henry, Thomas, Richard and Maria. Henry’s daughters, described as the Misses Newcome, were known to have lived together at the Parsonage at the beginning of the 19th century, and it seems likely then, that the inscription on the Parsonage Well, and the date indicate a connection with Elizabeth and Maria Newcome - the E, M and N. The A however, was problematic, until it was discovered that Elizabeth Hughes was, in fact, Henry Newcome’s second wife, that he was firstly married to Anne Jones, daughter of the Rev. Edward Jones of Southampton, with whom he had a daughter, Anne. Henry’s eldest child is known to have lived at the Parsonage, along with Elizabeth and Maria, at least until her marriage to a Captain Charles Jones of the Royal Navy at All Saints’ in Gresford in 1818. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural spring, the Parsonage Well of which we speak, was stone enclosed and inscribed with the initials of the daughters of Henry Newcome, perhaps on the occasion of Anne’s marriage. As a working theory, it works well enough, but it remains just that - a working theory.

How long before nature entirely reclaims the site of the Parsonage Well?

Nothing else is known of the Parsonage Well, whether or not it was of practical use to the Newcomes or indeed the villagers of Gresford. It is probable, given its anonymity in the written sources, that it was a Newcome ornamental, landscaped at a time before the railway was laid and a remarkable survivor of the upheaval of the arrival of the Age of Steam to Gresford.

It may be that not all wells were holy. It may be that not all wells were miraculously curative. But it is certain that all wells were vital to their communities and the wells of Gresford are examples of this tremendous importance.

Footnotes

There remains a curious mention of a custom of pins being dropped in an unnamed Gresford Well by the Rev. Peter Roberts in The Cambrian Popular Antiquities of Wales of 1815, but it is unknown from where this information was obtained and must remain somewhat suspect as a result.