Memories of St Peter's Pool

Submitted by Trevor Pool on Sunday 6th December 2009.

IN MY DAY, the Wellhead fields were used for grazing cattle and sheep and there was a bull tether near to the Shippon barn. This building was also used as a slaughterhouse and as a holding pen for pigs awaiting their final end before they ended up at Mayfield's, the pork butchers in West Street. At one time the field adjoining the barn was used as a sale lot by Tommy Lyle and unsold machinery was left there from one sale day to the next.

The house opposite the barn was then divided into two houses of a standard that might be termed today as slum dwellings. The Wellhead pool was always bothered with algae and the powers that be used a small boat each year to rake the offending water weed to the bank. As to the seven springs in the origins of the pool, that to my mind is a fairy story. There is, as the name describes, one supply of water and that is from the well on the east side of the pool.

Up to about 1947, you could see the head of the well outlined with a stone top arranged in a square which must have been built before the bank or bund was formed and was used to divert the water into the present watercourse.

Around 1947, Bourne United charities engaged a drag line to clear out the base of the pool and that action dislodged the stones at the top of the well and I presume that these stones dropped down the well.

When I was a lad, the pool never shrank to the size of a puddle as it does today. The demise of the Wellhead seems to have started when the sugar beet works opened at Spalding, taking large amounts of water for the processing operation of producing sugar. Now that the factory has closed, it appears that there is a bigger demand for underground water from farms and the increased population in the area. Bourne appears to have grown three or four fold over the years.

When I lived in St Peter's Road, our house was by the side of the stream and we were well aware when the beet season started because the volume of water would decrease and after a day or so would dry up completely, only returning when the beet season closed.

Submitted by Peter Sharpe, Sunday 6th December 2009.

THERE WERE TIMES when you could see the streams of bubbles breaking the surface in at least four different places, so it is not out of the question that there were seven emerging somewhere or other. As for the boat, the remains of it must have been what we used to stand in when we were trying to catch the eels when the pool had shrunk to a puddle towards the south side.

It was absolutely heaving with sticklebacks, eels and tiny, immature newts. There were also the quite evil looking larvae of the great diving beetle. I know somebody who put about ten of them in a large jar of water and about a week later, there was only one survivor, still happily munching on the last of its cell mates.

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