25/06/2026
⚽️ I know JT has promised you posts on sunshine and soccer, but I’m here to give you a hydration break by taking a look at a well in the north of Lichfield, near the aptly named Watery Lane and Curborough Lakes. Before the house building began there, Headland Archaeology were called in to excavate the site and found evidence of a Romano-British farmstead where people had made themselves a home two thousand years earlier.
🏛️Its residents lived in a roundhouse, a structure with wattle-and-daub walls and a central hearth, a set-up which seems far more British than Romano to me. Whoever was living here was still living like it was the Iron Age, rather than in the rectangular stone villas preferred by the Romans and the wealthy local aristocrats who adopted their dulcis vita.
🐄 Our citizens of Curborough had a granary to store crops, and their water came from a stone-lined well. Within the well, archaeologists found a circular Roman brooch with a red and white enamel inlay. Was it accidentally dropped, or was it a more deliberate offering to the gods? Another intriguing discovery is a massive stone placed inside the wall of the well. This must have been intentional, but what does it signify? At Headland, they suggest it may have been a symbolic act to mark the abandonment of the site. However, I can’t help but be reminded of Stoneywell near Longdon, where the locals believed the large boulder at the bottom of the spring was linked to the wellbeing of their livestock.
🤞Even closer to home at St Chad’s well, the 16th-century historian John Leland wrote that there was "sene a stone in the botom of it, on whiche, some say that Cedde was wont nakyd to stond on in the water, and pray”. The stone, or at least something claiming to be it, continued to be a significant element of the holy spring. In 1608, The English Martyrologe mentions ‘a cleere greate marble stone’, and there are later references to it being a ‘wishing-stone’. Sadly, this miraculous slab of marble has disappeared, presumably lost when the well was renovated in the mid-20th century.
🔭 The Watery Lane well and farmstead aren't the only incredible finds over at Curborough. I’ll report back with more discoveries, some of which take us even further back in time and have got us here at Lichfield Discovered looking at the local landscape through a whole different lens.
🌞In the meantime, if anyone has any idea where the missing stone of Saint Chad may be, please do let us know. Not only is it a travesty that such a potentially tangible part of his story is lost, but also, we’d quite like to try wishing for the weather to cool down. Just a bit.
Katie G 😎
Sources:
Watery Lane, Lichfield | Headland Archaeology
British Holy Wells website
