The Healing Powers of Whistlebitch Well, Utkinton

 

Being retired and a dog owner, I do a fair amount of walking and consider myself fairly knowledgeable of the local area, in particular Delamere Forest.  A chance conversation with a friend made me realise there was still more learn.  She asked if I knew about the Whistlebitch Well in Primrose Wood. I told her I’d never heard of it and so she gave me an impromptu history lesson. What made the story even more interesting was her family’s connection to it.

I wanted to find out more and found a well documented article written about the ancient well on the internet. It seems that for a short time around 400 years ago the sleepy little village of Utkinton was as busy as any place in England, attracting as many as 2000 people daily.  Details of why the well became a pilgrimage for so many people is contained in a pamphlet published in London in 1600 and written in a letter from a Cheshire man to a Gentleman friend of his on 16 August 1600, headed ‘Newes out of Cheshire concerning the New found Well’. The letter spoke of a man living in Utkinton called John Greeneway – an honest countyman of good credit and reputation aged about 50, who had been suffering for some time with fittes (intermittent hot and cold fevers). John consulted a learned physician in Chester who told him to go home, keep warm, have a good diet and to find some good, pure spring water and drink it, bathe in it and wash with it. If he followed this advice the physician told him he would be sure to recover quickly.  So John found a well within an area of Delamere Forest we now call Primrose Wood and did as the physician had directed and in a very short time was cured of his illness.

News of his recovery spread. Firstly locals came to partake of the well’s spring water themselves and when they too were cured word of the well’s healing properties spread

 

throughout Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Flintshire, Denbighshire and beyond.  It seemed all manner of ailments could be cured by drinking or bathing in its water, from colds, collicks and ruptures to wounds, swellings and painful joints.  Even blindness and deafness were cured.

Initially Master Done, the Forester Royal of Utkinton Hall (Delamere was a royal preserve) allowed the multitude of visitors access through the forest to reach the well, even though the deer hunted by the royal hunting parties would have been disturbed and no charge was made for the health-giving waters.  Eventually though the queen’s forests were seen to be at risk and within three years Master Done had closed the forest to everyone.  If the well had remained and developed, who knows Utkinton might have been as well known and prosperous as the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire.

It has been suggested that the healing properties of this well had been in use centuries before John Greeneway, indeed as far back as the Saxon period.  This is speculation but it was not until John Greeneway was cured of his agues that news of its healing powers spread beyond the locality and it became famous throughout the nation.  It is not known exactly why and when the well came to be known as the Whistlebitch Well.

You may be wondering about my friend’s connection to this story. Well, before marriage her name was Greeneway and generation after generation of her family had lived in Utkinton. A small cottage occupied by the family over 200 years ago still exists in the village.

 

 

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