St Blaise’s well & Chalybeate spring
Welcome to Bromley Palace Park and it’s historic features! This location is the first stop on the heritage and biodiversity trail around the historic parks in Bromley Town Centre.
The well also has it’s own page (here) on Bromley Civic Society’s page on The Bromley Palace Park, here.
In the medieval era, there had been an Oratory at St Blaise’s well in Bromley, and this spring was rediscovered in 1754. Wool was an important product for the area around Bromley, and through Kent, in the medieval ear, so St Blaise was a popular saint. In those days, they also liked a gruesome martyrdom. The well was supposed to have curative properties, and would help you get better from anything from fever to tummy ache. It even became a pilgrimage destination. However, in the reformation, Bishops of Rochester who lived here, such as Bishop Nicolas Ridley, did not indulge such superstitions, and the location of the well was lost and forgotten.
Fun Fact
Go to St Blaises, so you do less penance!
In the medieval era there had been an oratory (a chapel) at St Blaise’s Well in Bromley. People who had confessed sins (or been found out about them) could reduce the ‘penance’ (punishment) by saying their prayers at this oratory.
An example was Thomas Ferby, who was excommunicated in 1456, after a ‘clandestine’ (secret) marriage in St. Paul’s Cray Church. He had to present a wax taper of a pound weight at St Blaise’s oratory.
After the discovery, the Bishop Wilcox roofed the well with a thatch roof supported by 6 pillars, which looked fashionably rustic. In 1887 this roof was destroyed in a snow storm, and replaced by a tile one by Mr Coles Child. The stone basin did survive, until it was removed by one of the council officers and the circular brick feature put in, instead.
A retired local doctor analysed the spring waters upon it’s rediscovery in the Georgian era. Thomas Reynolds had been journeying down to Tunbridge Wells to take the Chalybeate water there, and was delighted to find a more convenient source, he said that he “has been many years been obliged to drink the waters of Tunbridge, to mitigate the symptoms a confirmed inveterate irregular gout, which were very various and very severe.” He published his analysis of the waters about 2 years later.
The famous 17th-century English physician, Thomas Sydenham, penned the verse:
These waters youth in age renew
Strength to weak and sickly add
Give the pale cheek a rosy hue
And cheerful spirits to the sad.
All the stops in the Bromley Town Centre Parks Heritage & Biodiversity trail can be found on the page about it here.
To continue the Heritage Trail, follow the little path (on the right hand side of the Carriage Drive) and on your right there is a rocky cliff – this is the fernery.
Browse our old photos, in 
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