Blow Wells

Our local Blow Wells may be what is causing flooding problems around Kingston Wood tucked away in one corner of the parish.

Blow Wells are pools created by water being forced up through cracks from chalk strata below. Large quantities of water can be harvested from them by artesian boring. Those a few miles away at Tetney are a well known nature haven and are still a source of commercial water supply. The Little Coates ones are hardly known at all, but Blow Wells Close is the name of one of the fields on an eighteenth century map and the Wells themselves are shown on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps at the same position.

They came to be exploited by the Grimsby Water Works Company with artesian bores which are three miles deep. Two of the eleven households in the parish in 1881 had the address The Waterworks; both Heads of Household are listed as ‘Engine Drivers’, and the steam engine concerned pumped water to a reservoir at Scartho. There is a prominent much later and now redundant concrete water tower on the site today (it is just visible in the photograph in the previous post), and the site is still owned and used by Anglian Water which I guess is a successor body for that original Company.

The minutes of the first meeting of the Yarborough Action Group came into my Inbox yesterday. The possibility of beginning a new ‘Forward’ for the Ward as part of the Neighbourhood Management process has been mentioned here before, and the Action Group is what has resulted. Organisations like North East Lincolnshire Council are pledged to report back on concerns raised. I hadn’t been free when the meeting took place, and I will not be free for the second meeting which I now see is scheduled for Maundy Thursday evening.

One of the concerns raised is flooding killing trees in the Wood and extending into neighbouring gardens. It is speculated that pumping might have stopped a few years ago leading to the problem. I went and took the picture this morning, and this pool looks as if it is exactly on the site of one of the Blow Wells in the early Ordnance Survey maps. The picture is taken looking south, and the houses beyond are the easternmost on Cambridge Park.

I wait to learn what is reported back to the Yarborough Action Group and whether the explanation is that the Blow Wells are reverting to their natural state.