St Peter's Pool

St Peter's Pool

St Peter's Pool

Water is the centre of this historic community and its source is St Peter's Pool or the Wellhead, a natural feature just a few steps from the town centre.

Today, it is a circular, clay-lined and embanked pool reputedly filled by seven springs and would have provided an abundant supply of water for the early settlers. This is a direct contrast to today when water is a valuable commercial commodity and supplies from Bourne are piped to other districts by Anglian Water and in times of drought, St Peter's Pool dries up for weeks at a time and this picturesque part of the town becomes a morass of mud and weeds.

The pool is possibly one of the most ancient sites of artesian water supply in the country and has figured prominently in the development of the town, especially as the water is known as chalybeate or impregnated with salts of iron and is therefore reputed to have qualities conducive to good health.

St Peter's Pool now forms part of the memorial gardens and it is this spring, or the stream that flows from it, that gives Bourne its name from the Old English word burna which was common in the early Anglo-Saxon period and is found in its modern form, particularly in Scotland, as burn meaning stream or spring. Many other English place names have a similar derivation with burn, borne or bourne as an ending to denote a river or stream in the vicinity.

Photographed February 2009

The footpath that follows the stream past St Peter's Hospital formerly skirted another large pond known as the horsepool, so called because it sloped gently at one end to allow horse and cart together to be washed in the clear spring water. This pool is thought to have been built about 1870 but was partly filled in between 1965-70. An excavation in 1994 revealed that it had been used to dump rubbish which was cleared away and the remaining pool can still be seen.

Photographed in December 2007

Photographed in February 2009

The former 19th century workhouse, later known as St Peter's Hospital, standing on the edge of the Wellhead Gardens, was acquired by the printing firm, Warners (Midlands) plc, in 1999 and two years later the company demolished the complex of buildings to make way a new press hall and bindery at a cost of more than £10 million. The building was officially opened on Friday 21st April 2006 when its visual impact on the Wellhead Gardens, a listed green open space, and particularly St Peter's Pool, became apparent. It covers 40,000 square feet and now entirely dominates that corner of the parkland and yet this factor was not raised by councillors or mentioned during the planning procedures, nor was its close proximity to this much loved amenity, despite widespread concern in the town about the impact the new structure would have on the outward prospect of the gardens.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

On Tuesday evening last, the bank of the celebrated Wellhead at Bourne gave way and the inhabitants were surprised on the following morning to find that the stream of water thence had taken a new course. - news item from the Stamford Mercury, Friday 24th March 1848.

The Wellhead has again resisted control and burst its bounds in the newly repaired place. - news item from the Stamford Mercury, Friday 31st March 1848.

REVISED MARCH 2015