Mr Scope,
I honestly have no idea what you are on about but I would like to accept your offer of help in freeing the Well. When the weather improves a bit we shall make haste to carry out the necessary remedial works. I know how to contact you.
In the meantime I have found a more recent article about the trespass and further discussion of the Bings Wood Well.
The evidence is mounting, don’t you think?
High Peak News
30 May 1942
Whaley Bridge.
Heigho! Now that we’ve embarked on the subject of ye olde we don’t seem able to relinquish it.
For though innovations like rose queen festivals crop up to divert the young, the older residents are faithful to the memories and experiences of yesterday (or yore, as some writers prefer to call it.)
That is why one native of the village, a septuagenarian, though to look at him you would imagine him still in the fifties, made a pilgrimage on Whit Monday to the well in the wood between the River Goyt and the Bings, and solemnly took a drink of the water.
He has made that pilgrimage annually on Whit Monday for 50 years in order to maintain the right of every inhabitant of the village to go to the well for water if he wishes to do so.
You see, children, 50 years ago Whaley Bridge had no water supply, and most of the people went to that well for their water. Then the Railway Company disputed the public’s right of way across the line.
In the local courts they won their case, but a Whaley Bridgeite, Mr Adam Morten, grandfather of Mr Harry Morten, of Greendale Farm, appealed to the high court.
For the high court hearing he took to London as witnesses five or six men and women of over 80, all of whom gave evidence that they had access to the well all their lives.
Counsel for the Railway Company was sure that he would soon confuse these old rustics, and make them seem ridiculous, to the detriment of their case. He cross-examined one old lady sharply, and after a number of questions repeated one which he had asked earlier:
“Nay,” retorted the old lady, “Ah’ve telled thee once, Ah’m non tellin’ thee again.”
The lawyer soon gave up, and Mr Morten won his appeal.
At one time the Railway Company took drastic steps to prevent the Whit Monday pilgrimage to the well, which used to be made by nearly all the villagers. For their last attempt they brought 250 men from Crewe, besides local employees, and lined the track with them from the old bridge to Proctor’s Smithy, with a truck at each end as a further safeguard.
Until the evening this railroad regiment kept the people off. In the evening, however, the bellman went round the village calling all men and women out. They came down in a small army, the women in front, the men behind. Spurred on by their men folk, the women pushed themselves through the railwaymen’s ranks. The railwaymen could scarcely attack women, and so the right of access was once again maintained.
Whaley Bridge has had its own water supply for 30 years now, and no one needs the water from the well. But for sentimental reasons, and in memory of a gallant fight, this old inhabitant makes his pilgrimage. We hope he has many more years left to him in which to continue its observance.
Now then Mr Jackson this is a newspaper report from 1942 so are you still able to pour scorn on me and this marvellous Well?
Will you still feel the need to call upon your, rapidly drying out, goldfish or your, rapidly rusting, JCB?
I think not. Like Adam I have proved and won my case.
R. S-S