Time in a Well

by Geoff Mellard
featured in the Premier Issue of Immersed®: The International Technical Diving Magazine

Only rarely does one get a chance to combine life passions, but such was the case when a Nottingham, England, diving club friend called seeking a buddy to explore a well on land that had belonged to Colonel John Hutchinson. The colonel had been a member of Parliament during the two English Civil Wars. As an avid student of 17th-century English history, I jumped at the chance to dive into a time tunnel that might lead to historic artifacts. (See HUTCHINSON, CROMWELL AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS, on pages 32-33 of the premier issue of Immersed®.)

Upon arriving to survey the site some 8 miles southeast of Nottingham in the small village of Owthorpe, we found that the great hall where Hutchinson lived no longer stands. The only remaining testament to all Hutchinson's grandeur is his private chapel, which now serves as the village church.

The well lay some 46 meters/150 feet to the right of the Owthorpe village church entrance. It was covered over with old railway ties and surrounded by barbed wire. We removed a few ties and peered down into water that seemed quite clear and was only about 2 meters/6 feet below the mouth of the well. While one usually thinks of wells as being round, this one was approximately 2 meters/6 feet square. We decided that the following weekend we would need a ladder to descend and some scaffolding to make an A-frame for lifting purposes. Other equipment would be rope, block and tackle, a basket made from wire, and, of course, diving gear, especially lights.

The following Saturday, the first task for buddy Fred Spencer and I was to clear the site, and set up the A-frame. After securing the ladder to the A-frame, we clambered down the well without fins, as they could serve virtually no purpose on this sort of dive. We signaled to each other thumbs down, and became the first human beings to see the bottom since the well was first built some several hundred years ago. During a slow descent to the bottom at just over 7 meters/23 feet, all precautions were taken not to touch anything, for if we did visibility would soon be zero. A length of old angle iron and strips of barbed wire protruded through the silt. Probing gently into the mire, my hand disappeared up to the elbow. After about six or seven minutes we surfaced, climbed out and began to assess the best way to explore the well. Adding another diver, Kevin Rolling, to the team to help empty the well of its contents appeared to be the best plan.

Working with one diver in the well and two above to haul up our finds seemed to be the safest, most efficient way to probe the well. Spencer became the first diver down, taking with him a wire basket tied to a rope, fixed to a block and tackle at the surface. Within 10 minutes, he surfaced and shouted for us to pull up the basket. After lugging it to the top and tipping it into a giant sieve, the first load turned out to be mainly large rocks, mud and numerous rat and rabbit skulls. During the next hour, Spencer filled eight to 10 baskets, but nothing of any consequence came out.

I was elected to go next, and after surfacing with my first basket, I soon found that a dive light was as much use as a sundial down a coal mine. My hour below produced no particularly exciting finds, but the rocks seemed to be getting larger. Rolling's session amounted to about the same, until he came across a huge stone slab, some 3 meters by 60 centimeters by 7.6 centimeters/10 feet by 2 feet by 3 inches. It weighed so much that it could not be hauled up manually, but somehow we managed to tie a rope around it and haul it up by tying the other end to a tow bar on the car. That was enough adventure for the weekend.

We agreed to speed up our progress by diving both Saturday and Sunday, and to bring in a compressor, enabling us to fill our tanks on site. This saved valuable time and meant that we could have at least two dives per person per day. Rolling had a brainstorm to make an airlift with 20-centimeter/ 8-inch diameter tubes.

Although the project was taken seriously, there was always an element of laughter. The ultimate joke was played on a local fellow who knew Spencer, and was quite knowledgeable about the Hutchinson family history. He had watched our progress with fervent interest, maintaining we would find something quite magnificent, like a sword, sooner or later. Well, it just so happened that I had a 17th-century replica mortuary sword. We really set this guy up and when he saw me ascending arm stretched, holding a sword like the Lady of the Lake with Excalibur in hand, he was convinced it was for real. It took an whole half hour for the truth to sink in.

Merriment aside, we had to get back to business. We had removed so much rock that the well was thick with mud, and what better way to remove it than with an airlift. We were surprised that it worked out so well. (See, BUILD YOUR OWN AIRLIFT, page 34 of the premier issue of Immersed®.) Everything was filtered through a sieve, but we would have to stop every now and again to remove large objects. These were mainly oak objects like a chest lid, stair rail posts and other artifacts that proved to be hundreds of years old. Hours of dredging in complete darkness dropped the water level by several feet, making it difficult for one diver to climb out and for the next diver to climb in.

We had an arranged signal so that when anything interesting came into the sieve it could be switched off at the bottom. Everyone at the surface kept a keen eye on what was filtering though. A glint of gold that caught my eye one day turned out to be the first of three tunic buttons. Alas, they were all brass, but in surprisingly good condition. Rolling had good luck with shoveling mire into a basket. One of his loads produced one of our best finds, a tablespoon. It looked like any other spoon to us, but older.

As the exploration progressed, we began to feel uneasy about diving the well. What if someone dropped a boulder or if we had weakened the sides of the well by removing so much water and debris? We were fortunate to not have any accidents, for no one had informed emergency services. No one had sought such technical data as the depth of water, and the depth of finds had not been logged. Nottingham Castle Museum, however, had been informed of the project.

My passion for knowledge of the English Civil Wars had brought me in touch with Alan McCormack at the museum. We invited him to meet us at the site on the following weekend. As it happened, that Saturday turned out to be our final day of diving, although we were not to know this yet.

We all met as usual at about 8:30 a.m. on a very bright, sunny and pleasantly warm day. The other divers agreed to go first, so I could greet McCormack at the site. The bacon sandwiches and tea were passed around, then Spencer suited up and went down with a shovel and the basket, sending up mainly loads of large rocks. A few pieces of pottery and glassware came out, but unfortunately not in one piece. The artifacts were more than 250 years old we later learned, leading us to nickname the well "the time tunnel," because the artifacts furthest down the well were the oldest.

All items conjured up vivid imaginings as to how these things got down there. You could visualize people in period dress standing around the well accidentally dropping personal possessions down, never to be seen again, or so they thought. Items most certainly were not thrown down purposely because it would be foolish to contaminate your own water supply. Besides, material possessions were far too valuable in those days to be thrown away.

Rolling and Spencer finished their shifts, bringing up some old oak timbers and lots of large rocks, and gratefully passed on the shovel and basket. McCormack had yet to arrive by 11:30 a.m., when it was my turn in the well. Heavy objects had been removed, so it was time to switch back to the airlift. Once again it was total and utter darkness and everything had to be done by feel. A tap on the airlift tube topside told me that they were ready. I turned the valve open and with my free hand began to feed in the silt. After 20 minutes or so, the hose hit upon a large solid object about 15 centimeters/6 inches below the silt. I felt it with my hand: it was rock. Upon removing the silt from around the obstruction and clearing a very large section, I realized it was the well floor.

After scouring the whole well base in every direction, there was still a large lump of silt clustered around something that might be a ladle. I put it in my pocket and surfaced. Rolling stuck his head over the top to yell that a pewter bowl had come up through the airlift. That's funny, I replied, because I've found the ladle that filled it. Then, hauling the trophy from my pocket, I found it wasn't a ladle but another bowl made of pewter with a very decorative, ornate handle marked with the initials E.M.

Around this time, McCormack finally arrived and looked at our discoveries with great interest. We told him that he could take the items to the museum, but there was the small matter of the well owner's consent. Nevertheless, he placed all the items in a cardboard box and put them in the car to examine and date the finds, which turned out to be from the 17th-century. It would be nice to think that Colonel Hutchinson actually held that porringer or bowl, but one can only imagine!