DISCOVERY BY PLACE NAME.
I have experienced this in several cases, and will detail one. A local antiquarian (Mr. W. Pilley) always maintained that there had been an ancient spring—the Bewell spring—close to Bewell House and the Hereford Brewery within the City. When I lived there with my father we knew nothing of it. But about a year ago the present owners in sinking a new deep well and building a new engine house, uncovered the following inscription cut in stone in the base of the brewery wall, but covered by a rockery in my time:—
WELL, 71 FEET, 1724.
I had always felt that the derivation given for the place name Bewell Street as Behind-the-wall Street was an error.
There is a hill on the Canon Pyon road called Bewley or Bewdley Pitch. Solely on account of my surmise that the Bewley might lead to the Bew-well, I tried a line on the map and found a ley exactly falling on this “pitch” (or steep road) passing from the north through Bishops Moat (west of Bishops Castle), Meer Oak, Bucknell Church, Street Court, Stretford Churchyard, and Birley Churchyard, and exactly over the site of the well. Southwards over Palace Ford, Dinedor Camp, Caradock, Picts Cross, Hom Green Cross, Walford Church, Leys Hill, Speech House; there being numerous confirmations in fragments of road.
THE LEY-MEN.
The fact of the ley, with its highly skilled technical methods, being established, it must also be a fact that such work required skilled men, carefully trained. Men of knowledge they would be, and therefore men of power over the common people. And now comes surmise. Did they make their craft a mystery to others as ages rolled by. Were they a learned and priestly class, not admitted until completing a long training—as Cæsar describes the Druids. Or did they—as Diodorus and Strabo says of Druids—become also bards and soothsayers. Did they, as the ley decayed, degenerate into the witches of the middle ages. Folk-lore provides the witches with the power of riding through the air on a broomstick, the power of overlooking, that of the evil eye. They (in imagination) flew over the Broomy Hills and the Brom-leys. It may be that the ancient sighting methods were condemned as sorcery by the early Christian missionaries.
Plate XIII.