Black Mary's Well

Black Mary's hole, a few stragling houses near the Cold Bath fields, in the road to Hampstead. It took its name from a Blackmoor woman called Mary, who about thirty years ago lived by the side of the road near the stile in a small circular hut built with stones.

Black Mary's Well, or Black Mary's Hole, near Cold Bath Fields, the conduit or well so called in Rocque's Plan of London, 1737, and in the large print of The North Prospect of London, 1728, Dr. Bevis, in the passage cited under Bagnigge Wells, sought to identify it with those wells, suggesting that the title was a corruption of Blessed Mary's Well. But other writers of the time assert that it was situated a little farther south, and on the opposite (or east) side of the Bagnigge Wells Road, "by the footway from Bagnigge to Islington." The name, they say, was given to it from a black woman, Mary Woolaston, who, about 1680, lived in a rude circular stone hut by the well and rented the water, which she supplied to applicants, her best customers being the soldiery encamped in the adjacent fields. But this derivation, though so seemingly particular, is not without its difficulties. In Vertue's Plan of the City and Suburbs of London as fortified by order of Parliament in 1642–1643, we find "a battery and breastwork on ye hill E. of Blackmary's Hole." It is of course possible that, as Vertue's "Plan" was not engraved till 1738, the names may be those then in use, and that Black Mary's Hole may have been so named subsequent to the building of this fort. The well was enclosed about 1697¹ and grew into repute as a chalybeate and a specific for sore eyes. In 1761 "a few straggling houses near the Cold Bath Fields, on the road to Hampstead," bore this name.² In 1818 a row of small houses was built on the ground; the well was covered over, and its site soon forgotten. But in 1826 the "spacious receptacle of the mineral spring" was accidentally laid open in the front garden of No. 3 Spring Place. These front gardens were shortly after swept away to form the roadway of a narrow street, named Spring Street. This was opposite to the north end of the wall of Cold Bath Fields Prison in Farringdon Road, lately cleared away. All trace of the well, and even the local memory of it, is gone. The whole of this neighbourhood at one time abounded in holy wells and reputed medicinal springs [see Bagnigge Wells, Chad's (St.) Well, Clerkenwell, Coldbath Fields, Spa Fields]. In the British Museum is preserved "the earliest example of a flint implement found in the Drift," and described in the original Sloane Catalogue as "A British weapon found with an elephant's tooth opposite to Black Mary's Well, near Gray's Inn Lane."

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¹ Tomlins's Islington, p. 171.
² Dodsley, vol. i. p. 324.

Black Mary's Hole. Cromwell says that a black woman named Woolaston lived near one of the [Bagnigge Wells] fountains, and sold the water, and that, therefore, it was called "Black Mary's Hole." The spring was situated, says Mr. Pinks, in the garden of No. 3 Spring Place. Close by there used to be a low public-house called "The Fox at Bay," a resort, about 1730, of footpads and highwaymen.

In the "Shrubs of Parnassus," poems on several occasions, by W. Woty, otherwise "John Copywell," published in 1760, there are some lines entitled "Bagnigge Wells," wherein the following allusion is made to these springs:—

. . . . . . "And stil'd the place
Black Mary's Hole—there stands a dome superb,
Hight Bagnigge; where from our forefathers hid,
Long have two springs in dull stagnation slept;
But taught at length by subtle art to flow,
They rise, forth from oblivion's bed they rise,
And manifest their virtues to mankind."

[Black Mary's Hole] ... a spring known as Black Mary's Hole, the name believed to be a degeneration of Blessed Mary's Well; the whole process of naming is an apt token of the darkening fate of London's springs. Other derivations have been suggested. The well may have belonged to the convent of St. Mary's, Clerkenwell, where the Benedictine nuns wore their familiar black habits. It may have been the property of a woman, Mary, who owned a black cow or alternatively by a black woman of the same name. It may have been dedicated to the "black Madonna," the Virgin depicted in the early medieval period with dark skin. The names of London are mixed and mingled, compounded by folklore and superstition. Black Mary's Hole was believed to be buried for ever, but in 1826 its wood covering disintegrated and a large hole appeared in the footpath.