X-Files from the Bog: The Old Well Inn, Barnard Castle

The Old Well

The Old Well Inn, Barnard Castle, has a well in a cellar which was once used for brewing beer. The pub is in a line of shops which run adjacent to the old castle wall. Back in 1969 the army sent divers down, and there is talk of local divers repeating the exercise in the mid-1970's.

I went down into the well to take another look, and to see if I could find any old bottles. Barnard Castle itself is built on a limestone cliff, and the well definitely has the appearance of a karst sinkhole. I've done cavern diving and introductory cave diving courses, plus blackwater PSD training, but I'm not really a cave diver. I was therefore very conservative in what I tried to do. I have wings and pony (no side-mounting) and so I wasn't going to risk penetration into any side tunnels.

Going Down

I set up ladders, one horizontally across the well with the other lashed vertically down into the hole. It took a few attempts to get the ladders stable, and I had to run the rope around a flagstone, but the result was satisfactory. There was just enough room for me to squeeze through the hole but once you are in the well itself is very wide, not a constricted space at all.

Visibility in the water was completely non-existent, at least on my dive, effectively white-out conditions. The water seems sulfurous and I assume the sediment is dissolved limestone.

I had a reel but decided against using it as it was more likely to cause entanglement, given that this would be a vertical dive in zero viz. I needed both hands to feel down the wall of the well. I did 3 dives, one each at the north-east, south-east, and western sides. The first took me down to about 25 feet before I turned back, with no sign of a slope to the walls or a bottom to the well. The next dive took me to about the same depth where I found cord or rope, or maybe frayed sacking. I turned back to avoid entanglement. The final dive was to about 15 feet where my fins started bashing against rock or some sort of obstruction, again I turned back at that point.