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CN THE DISCOVEET OF A DISUSED ANCIENT WELL 

 IN THE PAEISH OF BEINSOP. 



By the Rev. William Elliot, M.A., President of the Woolhope Field Club. 



My main reason for drawing- up the brief account which I have the honour now of 

 reading before you has been that, little as I have to say, and offering' no pretension 

 to having discovered anything of a very high degree of interest, yet, such as the 

 discovery was, it might find a record in the Transactions of your Club. Preserved 

 in this way from entire oblivion, it is quite possible that it may prove at some 

 future time to supply a link in the antiquarian history of the county ; so frequently 

 do things trivial in themselves serve a useful purpose in confirming, or elucidating, 

 more important observations, when taken in connection with them. Moreover, 

 my own antiquarian knowledge is so very slight that I should like to elicit the 

 opinion of those among you more qualified in that way than myself on one or two 

 points that seemed to me to offer questions for resolving. I beg you to accept this 

 by way of apology for the meagreness of my statement. 



In the month of September last year my attention was called by ray neigh- 

 bour, Mr. Norman Edwards, of the White House, to a strange subsidence which 

 had occurred in the previous May in one of the fields of his farm, called on the 

 Tithe Map, "'The Eleven Acres." To the depth of a little more than two feet 

 the ground had sunk to the extent of an irregular circle of eight feet in diameter. 

 Now this had not taken place with any inclination from the circumference towards 

 the centre, but regularly and uniformly, so that the sides of the cavity formed 

 were as cleanly cut as if the spade had cut them ; and the barley, with which the 

 field was sown, had grown regularly in its rows on the depressed surface, and been 

 cut, as over the rest of the field, in the harvest. The obvious suggestion that 

 there was a well of some kind underneath was confirmed by experiment, when, 

 at about three feet from the surface, we came upon the stones of which the well 

 was formed. 



I engaged a professional well-sinker, and we proceeded to examine it. We 

 found that the well was entirely filled with earth at the top. It was regularly 

 "steened" with undressed stones of varying size, put together without any mortar 

 or cement, but skilfully and strongly built. I suppose we were right in assuming, 

 from its difference in this respect to the remains of Roman masonry, and from 

 what we found in it, that it was of an older date of construction than the time of 

 the Roman occupation. For about 10 or 15 feet we dug out the earth contained in 

 the well. Amongst this we found the pieces of pottery which I will by and bye 

 describe, as well as many bones of animals. Then for about 16 feet more the space 

 was filled with several tons of rough blocks of stone, such as might probably have 

 been used for building, and these had bones amongst them. For the last two or 

 three feet there occurred, first clay, getting wetter and wetter as we went on, and 

 then very wet sand. At the depth of 36 feet we were obliged to stop the work. 



