“SEEING that the water supplied by the water company is ill adapted for beverage purposes, its component parts being principally made up of the extract of old rags and chemical refuse from the mills, together with a decoction of the carcases of dead cats, dogs etc, it behoves us to keep a careful watch and guard over the springs that surround the city,” said a letter from “Vigilant” in the Durham Advertiser of April 30, 1867, beneath the headline “Flass Well”.
But Vigilant continues: “The well is choked up with filth and rubbish of the most abominable kind.”
He urges that Durham parish council to clear the well as soon as possible.
More than 150 years later, Vigilant’s wish has come true: the Flass Well in Durham has been cleared. Its new look, complete with information board, was unveiled on Friday as part of the 50th anniversary commemorations of local residents’ campaign to save the neighbouring Flass Vale from development which led to the formation of the Friends of Flass Vale.
After: below, the Flass Well is cleared out
The well, which is on the 1861 Ordnance Survey map of the city, has been cleared by Durham University’s archaeology department in collaboration with the parish and county councils, the Redhills miners’ parliament, on whose land it sits, and the Friends.
The archaeologists’ excavations discovered a brick and concrete structure built over a spring. There was a space where a pump once sat – local people have told Looking Back that the water was pumped through lead pipes to the drinking fountain which is now attached to the railway viaduct – and there were steps down to the well were there was evidence of railings to prevent people from falling down it.
There were no signs of Jeannie, “the White Lady”, who is said to haunt the area following a murder in 1789. Looking Back told her story last week.
Flass Well – the word “flass” is of Scandinavian origin and means “marshy” – was one of handful of reliable springs that provided the people of the city with an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. They clearly needed it even when a water company was formed to pipe in water, as our correspondent Vigilant shows, and they needed it as recently as the 1960s.
“I remember being sent by my mother to get water from the Flass Well, probably in the winter of 1962-63, when I would have been 10 years old, when the water was cut off in our street by a burst main,” says Billy Mollon, whose detective work has also flushed out Vigilant’s letter to the Advertiser.
As water supplies became more reliable, the well fell out of use, and was used as a dumping ground. The archaeologists discovered rubble, tyres and a Darth Vader figure in the well – exactly the sort of rubbish that Vigilant was railing against in 1867.
VIGILANT clearly had a lot of knowledge of the Flass Well. In his letter, he said the spring originally spurted out of the ground near Colpitts Terrace, but when the railway viaduct was built in 1857, it was diverted to its current location. He also said there was another Flass Well near Shaw Wood.
MANY of the ancient wells of Durham were regarded as holy wells because of the miraculous way in which they always had clean, fresh, drinkable water in them. As well as the Flass Well, there was…
The Galilee Well: the Galilee Chapel at the west end of the cathedral was built between 1175 and 1189 over the top of this well. There is a stone wellhead on a footpath beneath the cathedral with a mysterious metal grille over a chasm, but inside now appears to be dry.
St Cuthbert’s Well: near the Galilee Well, the shape of the slope changes, from steep sandstone to less pronounced shale, and St Cuthbert’s Well gushes from between the two rock formations. Its wellhead was restored in the 1970s, when the legend “Fons Cuthbert” was added and a date of 1600.
St Mary’s Well: it once flowed into the Wear from its south bank beneath South Street, but it has been dry for centuries.
St Oswald’s Well: directly beneath St Oswald’s Church on New Elvet is a well dedicated to the saint, which was once a great outpouring. When Samuel Grimm sketched it on his countrywide tour in 1773, it had three basins. Much of its stonework was destroyed by vandals towards the end of the 19th Century.
Fram Well: it doesn’t seem to have been a holy well, just a medieval drinking well. Its wellhead was moved slightly in Framwellgate in 1959 for the street clearances.
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