Holy Well: OS Grid-Reference – SK 061 810
To find Nanny’s Well, take B5474 out of Chapel and take the right hand turning called Crossings road (which goes to Chinley) which is before Frith view on the left. Continue until the small wall surrounding the site can be seen on the right.
Archaeology & History
The name it is said to be either from St Ninian (less likely) or St Anne (more likely as she is also considered the mother of Mary and thus Grandmother of Jesus).
It is described in M.J.B Baddeley’s Peak district of Derbyshire (1913) and the neighbourhood as:
“a valuable but neglected spring of chalybeate water.”
Yet in 1895, a Manchester firm of Grace, Calvert and Thompson analysed it and found it:
“not polluted to any extent with organic matter of animal or vegetable origin and comes from a spring of considerable depth and that no surface water has become mixed with it’…in same respects the water of this well is of the same nature as that from the Tunbridge Wells springs.”
The site is now an iron pump by the side of Crossings Road, known as Nanny Well Road, enclosed in a low wall along which. The pump no longer works and the well capped but it can be heard and just about seen through a crack beneath.
Folklore
It was visited on Easter Morning, with sugar or licorice to make Spanish Water, and then the bottles were hung around their necks. The site is one of four wells dressed annually since the 1980s in July and the site is blessed.
Extracted from Parish, R. B., (2008) Holy Wells and Healing springs of Derbyshire
http://insearchofholywellsandhealingsprings.wordpress.com
© R.B. Parish, The Northern Antiquarian