Tag: well

#365daysofbiking A total bore

Thursday February 18th 2021 – Haring around Chasewater dam on a working from home exercise ride – for once in the daylight – I nearly came a cropper.

I was a shade off catching my pedal on this protruding piece of steel pipe.

It has a close fitting cap and is padlocked shut.

This erstwhile cyclist and walker boobytrap is not some idle lump of former mining equipment stuck in the ground, or a piece of scrap the local tatters have missed – but a monitoring well for the land around.

Ground engineers monitor the area around Chasewater Dam for groundwater pollution and signs that the dam may be leaking. To do that they have a number of these bores, drilled and sleeved, which are dipped and monitored regularly for changes in water level and the chemical composition of the water within.

These are a familiar sight around Chasewater, but also many of the public open spaces in the area that require ground monitoring – like Brownhills Common, Shire Oak Nature Reserve and Clayhanger Common.

So mind your step and watch out when cycling off road: They are quite sturdy and not very forgiving…

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#365daysofbiking Stone me

February 1st – Heading out to for a gentle spin and resolving to take it a little easier – after all, I’d now got a cold developing which seemed to feature a particularly unpleasant mouth infection as a side dish – I bumbled past the monitoring well sensor post by Pier Street Bridge in Brownhills. Something on top caught my eye.

A beautifully painted smile stone.

There’s a local culture (particularly in Clayhanger in recent years) of painting random found stones with patters, cartoons or any art you fancy, then hiding them for smile stone enthusiasts to find.

Frequently this is a fun activity enjoyed by families with young kids.

I left this one where it was, but it was lovely to see.

Find out more about smile stones here.

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December 7th – it was a beautiful afternoon with a very unpleasant wind, but the sun and commons of Brownhills were a joy to behold. The heaths and scrub glowed beautifully, as did the canal embankments.

These days it’s hard to imagine these beautiful places have a harsh, lingering industrial legacy.

Looking for deer near the site of the lost Coombe House, at Coppice Side, I spotted this monitoring well, a int of a none-too-pleasant past; this is the edge of a former landfill and boreholes like this are regularly unlocked and ‘dipped’ to monitor contamination. The EX symbol warns of an explosive gas hazard – methane, mostly, from rotting refuse buried underground.

This is a problematic site and will require monitoring for many years to come. 

I looked up from it to see the backside of a young hind disappearing into the the copse…