Ancient Sites: The Rough Hill

I found Rubery Hill by accident; it slowly appeared in my peripheral vision as I walked through the council estate. The estate is dominated, along Cock Hill Lane, by five eight storey tower blocks, their original open balconies now covered by tacked-on extensions of blue-grey. Music trickled from some of the windows, a stocky man tinkered with his car, and two teenage girls hopped over the boundary wall, immaculately made up. I was immersed in life at Birmingham’s most southern edges when, initially, I realised that there was an old stone wall lining the grass verge on the opposite side of the road. Smooth sandstone blocks, moss-covered and crowned with a tall hedge, and an awareness of something else, something not housing estate, was how Rubery Hill first emerged. And then, slowly, the steep hillside pulled my gaze up to the sky. 

Ancient Sites: Search For the Holy Well

The emerging, infant waters of Holy Wells have long been valued for their healing properties, on both body and spirit. They were holy because it was believed they had been sanctified by a saint or had issued after some miraculous intervention. Pilgrims journeyed to them for absolution and renewal, and communities gathered round them in seasonal reverence, enacting adornment rituals. I am drawn to such places as curiosities, but even more so to those that have been lost to time. So, when I found the words “Holy Well”, written in a Gothic typeface on a Victorian Ordnance Survey map of hilly outlands at the southern edges of Birmingham, my curiosity was piqued. Beneath was written “Chalybeate” – a term referring to natural springs containing iron salts, which often give the water a metallic taste and, sometimes, a reddish-brown tinge. The iron content was thought to provide healing properties. All this was enough to prompt me, with a characteristic lack of planning, to set out in the direction of the holy site to discover what, if anything, remained.