Location: Spring Cottage, 10 Lower Wyche Road, Lower Wyche.
Description: a spring rising as the rear of Spring Cottage and visible in a grille in the road before entering a crude spout and basin on the other side of the road.

Spring Cottage, known until the early 1980s as Jasmine Cottage, has a spring in the garden. The spring is in a wet hollow at the side of the cottage. This would account for some of the water which runs through the roadside grille but not all, so it seems likely that other similar sources have been contained in the immediate vicinity; it is believed that a spring exists at No. 20 Wyche Road.

The water runs beneath Lower Wyche Road and is then contained in a crude spout and basin. From there it runs downhill in an open rill flowing beneath the Wells Road, where it eventually ends up in the pond on Malvern Common. This pond is also used to take surplus water from the Severn Trent Water reservoir at Lower Wyche.

The Lower Wyche reservoir was built in 1854 by Malvern Parish and is the oldest reservoir in the area still in use. It holds one million gallons and is fed by three springs in the Rushey, Wide and Firs Valleys and now supplies the collector main which runs along the Wells Road. Some years ago there was a move to fence the Firs reservoir but this was resisted by the Malvern Hills Conservators.[1]

The Wyche reservoir was therefore an important storage facility for Malvern and some of the routine concerns can be gauged from the local paper:

Malvern Advertiser 5 Oct 1867 - The water tanks at the Wyche had sand in them and needed cleaning out. It was decided to clean them out and paint the railings at a cost of UK pounds 4,000.

Malvern Advertiser 22 Nov 1873 - At every meeting of the Board a sheet of paper was placed on the table showing the amount of water in the tank. The amount in there was frequently checked but amounts differed quite widely from one week to the next, output from the hills was too variable to monitor predictably.

The turncock flushed out the debris from the old pipes every quarter in the mid 1970s and turned off the water supplies when maintenance work needed to be done. The fire brigade used to test the fire hydrants and in doing so caused iron to get from the pipes into the main water supply, thus turning the water brown.

Illustration:
1. The crude spout and basin on the eastern side of the Lower Wyche Road.

2. The rill that feeds the pond on Malvern Common in the 1990s.

3. The site of the spring and roadside grill at number 10.

Footnotes:
[1] Malvern Gazette, 20 November 1992 "Call to Fence Off Tanks". 

 

 

The map alongside is a small section of our more comprehensive map of the area. For the complete map together with a description and history of this site see "Celebrated Springs of the Malvern Hills" (2012).

 

 

 

 

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Celebrated Springs of 
THE MALVERN HILLS  

A definitive work that is the culmination of 20 years researching the springs and wells of the Malvern Hills, published by Phillimore. This is the ideal explorers guide enabling the reader to discover the location and often the astounding and long forgotten history of over 130 celebrated springs and wells sites around the Malvern Hills. The book is hard back with dust cover, large quarto size with lavish illustrations and extended text. Celebrated Springs contains about 200 illustrations and well researched text over a similar number of pages, together with seven area maps to guide the explorer to the locations around the Malvern Hills. It also includes details on the long history of bottling water in the Malvern Hills.

Written by Bruce Osborne and Cora Weaver, this book is available on-line for £15.00 (delivered UK) - click Malvern Bookshop on the green panel top left. Alternatively send a cheque payable to Cora Weaver with your name and address to 4 Hall Green, Malvern, Worcs. WR14 3QX.