218 MINERAL WATERS AND MEDICINAL SPRINGS OF ESSEX.
but there is no spring or running well there now. While this
may very well have been the site, there is another well still
nearer to the nine-mile stone—namely, in the middle of a meadow
belonging to Mr. Buxton and adjoining the present cricket
ground. For our knowledge of it, we are indebted to Mr., B. G.
Cole, who has been kind enough to make many enquiries on the
spot. The well in question (fig. 4) is about two hundred yards
to the east of the road and is furnished with a pump. It is a dug
well about 4 feet in diameter, bricked round with small bricks
which look (as far as one can see) very old. When Mr. Christy
visited it in company with the Messrs. Cole on the
13th November 1907, there was 4ft. 3ins, of water in it and the
surface of the water was 6ft. below the surface of the ground.
A sample of the water brought up yielded the following
results :—
There appears to be nothing to justify the opinion that this
water has medicinal properties. The trace of iron is not
sufficient even to impart a chalybeate taste,
Mr. Dalton writes that the water in question comes, doubt-
less, from the base of one of the several patches of Glacial
Gravel capping the ridge of London Clay between the Roding
and the Ching.
(11.)—The West Tilbury Wells.—About fifteen years after the
publication (in 1711) of Allen's second work, there was dis-
covered at West Tilbury, on the north bank of the Thames, a
medicinal well which afterwards became famous—more so than
any other of our Essex wells. It retained its fame, too, for a
longer period than any other Essex well. It appears, indeed, to
have been the only one the water of which ever had a real
and enduring commercial value. Its history is related very