Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Cold Ashton ·
Why the Well Covers Itself
In one parish the first repair of every year is the stone lid on the well, whatever else in the place is falling down.
- status: folklore
You'll have seen it if you've come through at all: the pump-yard opposite the chapel gates, a round stone lid bedded down onto the wellhead like a millstone shouldered on by men who meant it. Iron ring flat on top, rim dressed with new mortar every Lady Day and no mistake. Whatever else is falling down that year — slates, the bridge parapets, their own yard gate off its hinge — the lid is first on the order of works and first done. Item one, the parish book calls it, and has called it since the book began; why the book began you'd have to ask what's left of the parish chest, and nobody has.
You'll get the reason of it at the George of a Sunday evening or from the masons on Cold Lane of a morning, and it comes in two halves they will not separate for you, because they say the mortar doesn't care which half is the true one.
The old half comes down pumping-side. My grandmother had it from her father, who was the pumping man on this yard forty years, and he had it from the men who put him to the ropes. A well, he'd say, rapping the pump-handle like a deacon at a pew, a well is the first room of a house. It's dug before the footings are set out; it's the one room every house along the yard shares the floor of; and you roof every room you live in, and you roof the one that drinks. Leave the first room open, he'd say, and the house forgets which way down is — forgets, and goes looking for it where you'd rather it didn't.
Then the year of the open lid, which they tell different — the hard winter, some say, and the masons laid up; others say the month the men were away at the fishing and nobody could be spared — but they all tell it to the same month, which was the month the rim's mortar failed and no knee was bent to it. The lid stood off a month. In that month the cellars of the houses round the yard came up wet, every one of them to one mark, a line level as a snapped chalk-line cellar to cellar, and not a drop running gutter to gutter between any two of them; and the wellwater came up warm in a frost that split the pump's leather twice. On the Sunday the masons reset the lid with lime that was never meeting-authorised, and by the Tuesday the mark had gone down off every wall and the water ran cold as it had always run. Nobody has carried a rule down those cellars before or since, and nobody will, because to count a thing twice in this parish is how you come to owe it twice.
The book is the third half, if a thing can have one. The Lady Day entries run back unbroken, lid before slates, lid before bridge, one year the lid done while the chapel stood open to the sky and the congregation sang under tarpaulins about shelter — and for that one open month, where an entry fell due, there is a page with nothing at all on it, and it is the cleanest page in the book. The book keeps the lid's holidays, you might say, and no other days off anywhere in it.
It has been the Cold Lane masons tell it now, of a Saturday, at the George's end table with their boots to the fender and the young ones round them quiet as buckets. The pumping went out of the parish years since and the telling went with the trowels, and they'll show you the trowels if you strike at credentials. They get as far as the lid, and at the lid they always stop on the same stone: the lid does the rest after. Then up the yard they go, and the question they leave on the table is the one the parish has never put in the book and never answered: if the mortar keeps nothing off, why has it been kept first for longer than any roof in Cold Ashton ever stood — and who, all that time, was the keeping for?