124 RAMBLE OVER DERBYSHIRE HILLS AND DALES. 
The inscriptions of these various tombs are all given by Wood in 
his exhaustive history, so that I shall not repeat them here. 
We continued our walk on to the Moor, up a very rough road, 
high above Eyam, to see Mompesson’s Well, as it is called, which 
consists of a stone, covering the source of a tiny mountain 
rivulet in a hollow on the left as we ascended, the upper surface 
of which is carved in the form of a cross. This was one of the 
points, on the imaginary line drawn around the village, which 
none were to pass, where provisions and other necessaries were 
brought for the villagers, and where the money used in the 
transactions was washed in the pure water of the spring, so that 
the contagion might not spread.* We returned by an upper road, 
MOMPESSON’S WELL. 
whence we had a fine view of Eyam, and passed through some 
fields with further memorials of the plague north of the church ;— 
the same fields where the young: and beautiful Catherine Mom- 
pesson, the loving wife of the heroic rector, walked on the 
twenty-second of Atgust, 1666, when she exclaimed to her 
husband what a sweet smell there was, and -was immediately 
possessed by the plague, with- which she struggled “for a few 
days, when her spirit took its flight to the regions of bhss.” Our _ 
way continued through the churchyard, where we saw her tomb in 
* Similar precautions were used at Derby in the time of the pestilence, a 
relic of which is now placed in the Arboretum, called the Headless Cross, 
which once stood upon Nun’s Green. 
a 
