May 18th – Cutting back over Brownhills Common I remembered that I’d not recorded a mystery I solved a couple of months ago (because my photos then were too poor) – so I paid the site of a recovered childhood memory a visit.

When I was a child I remember walking over the common many times with my father, between the Chester Road, Parade and Watling Street School. I remember back then there being a fair sized, man made pool, surrounded by crunchy gravel, that in spring had frogspawn in it. At one end of the pool was a concrete rectangular bulkhead with a blue pipe protruding that trickled clear water into the pond.

There is no pool today, no gravel. I have looked for evidence of the pool on maps, aerial images and spoke to people about it. The only person I ever found who recalled it was fellow Brownhills historian David Hodgkinson.

Mooching over the common in spring, I nearly suffered a spill coming off a track by the corner of woodland into a ditch. Seeing a concrete block formed the edge of the ditch, I made a discovery.

It is certainly the concrete bulkhead I remember. It has a ten inch vitreous pipe in the centre, the protruding part smashed away, although it clearly once projected from the surface. The inside of the pipe is blue.

The site of the pond is now a copse, and bone dry. but it’s still a hollow.

I was astounded to find the site of this, which I’d convinced myself was a false memory.

Now, the site and pipe are clearly many years dry. I wonder who created it, and why?

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