kidmore end well update 1508

A HERITAGE listed well in Kidmore End is at risk of collapsing unless £25,000 is raised to replace its decaying support structure.

Kidmore End Parish Council will appeal to the community for money to repair the Grade II listed Kidmore End Well, located opposite St John the Baptist Church, after a condition survey found its sill base would need to be replaced.

The well, which is believed to have sat in the T-junction in Tokers Green Lane since the 1860s, was identified at the end of 2023 to be decaying at its wooden base.

It was enclosed in orange mesh fencing in April after the parish council failed to secure a permit from Oxfordshire County Council to fence off the area.

Parish councillor Nick Room, who took on the project in April, said the fencing was necessary to prevent an accident from occurring.

He said: “If you walked on the cover of the chamber, you could have fallen down 250 feet to the bottom of the well.

“It was that bad and the wood is rotten and a lot of the fixings and so on have deteriorated over the years and the thing was leaning.

“I mean, it sits in a vulnerable position in that T-junction and there are big vehicles these days that come through little villages.

“At times, you can see that damage has occurred to some of the kerb stones. All in all, we felt that it was a safety hazard and we needed to fence it off.”

The parish council has since commissioned a condition survey which found the sill plates beneath the well were severely decayed and would need to be replaced.

The well has now been surrounded with temporary hoarding, within which joists are being used to prop the well up to prevent further erosion, while the council works to secure funding to move repairs along.

The report, which is available on the parish council website and has been stapled to the hoardings, also found decay in the upper horizontal beams and well door mounting strips, meaning the well door is at risk of collapsing into the well.

It determined the decay has been caused mostly by exposure to moisture and evidence of white rot was found at the ends of the sill plates.

Andrew Jarvis, owner of Chiltern Woodcraft, has provided an estimate of costs to restore the well, but this is subject to closer inspection which would require lifting the well off its base.

Mr Room said the parish council will discuss sources of funding at its September meeting, which will likely include crowdfunding and applications to the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

He said he has seen a “groundswell” of community support to have it restored.

He added: “I think some of the villagers would subscribe to a crowdfund, but there would be calls on some of the major funders to ask if they have got any funding to be able to help.

“I know there are already one or two groups in the village doing some work fundraising for it.

“It’s one of the few items of real heritage that are left in the place. It’s an attractive piece of Victorian structure, it had a function and it could still work, even though people don’t use it.

“It’s important for the spirit in the village to have a feature like that which is quite unusual.

“If we weren’t to do something it would fall over, and that’s why we took the action we did so quickly in April.

“I don’t think the village would want that, you would have to cover it anyway because it would be a hole in the road.”

In April, Caroline McAslan, of Tokers Green, attended a parish council meeting in which she appealed to the council to expedite repairs to the structure.

Mrs McAslan said she had previously decorated the structure with floral arrangements to mark special occasions such as Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, King Charles’s Coronation, Christmas and Remembrance Day.

She said she has now started fundraising with her husband by selling off disused tools to put towards the repairs and has so far raised £165.

She said: “I’m delighted that the action has started to ferment but I know that it’s going to take a very long time and we’re going to need an awful lot of money now.

“We’re hoping that we might get some large donations from various organisations that might be able to support the project, because I don’t think that we will be able to raise it all ourselves.

“It’s important that people get behind such projects because we circle the well all the time to go in and out of our various lanes, they all merge on this one spot, so it’s terribly important that we keep it going. It’s one of our greatest assets.”

The well was registered by Historic England in 1985 as a Grade II listed structure and is constructed with a timber framing and a wood pyramidal shingle roof.

It was initially under the charge of the vicar and the church warden in the 19th century, when it was used to extract water from the chalk hills, but was taken over by the parish council in 1895.

To donate to the fund to restore the well email clerk@kepc.info