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Standing waters (millpools and fishponds)
In 1876, according
to Blood's Map, there were 144 pools in Yardley, most of them very small, being
ancient moats or less ancient quarries and marl-holes. The pieces of water
detailed below together total about 65 acres, but the acreage today is not more
than 20. Only Swanshurst and Titterford Pools, and the odd little Round Pool,
survive because they are amenities in parks: Cold Bath, a hazard in Moseley Golf
Course, is more than half silted up, and 'Dell Pool' below is better known
(incorrectly) as 'Moseley Bog'.
BACH MILLPOOL (BAMPTONS
MILLPOOL, PRIORY MILLPOOL) was made by damming Yardley wood Brook a furlong west
of its confluence with the Cole. Priory Road runs along its earthen dam. The
Yardley (Birmingham)/Solihull boundary, following the brook, bisects the pool.
There is no reference to the pool in the 1495 and 1609 Boundary Presentments,
but it was in existence because the mill is named. ‘Bach' means 'small stream'
and appears as a mill name elsewhere. Beighton does not show the pool on his Map
of 1725, although he plots Priory Road: but he makes several mistakes and may be
disregarded. The attractive two-acre pond was called Bamptons Pool last century
after the family which owned it - not Brompton Pool, a map error which has been
perpetuated in the name of a modern estate street. Like all other lakes, whether
millponds or not, the pool was regularly net-harvested to supply fresh fish for
local residents and the market in Birmingham. The head and tall races of Bach
Mill and its river-fed pool have disappeared along with the mill itself.
TITTERFORD MILLPOOL was in use by 1783. The mill was recorded four years
earlier, but like Sarehole certainly and Bach Mill probably it was powered by a
tributary only until its rebuilding. At each site a long leat from the Cole was
then led to a riverside pool, fed also by the side-stream. Titterford was thus
powered both by the Cole and Chinn Brook. Today only the Cole leat fills the
pool. Titterford's tailrace is carrying Chinn water only to the Cole. The making
of the Titterford Pool was a major earthwork of the kind then being built for
canals: it involved construction of an earthen dam more than 500 yards in length
and up to 10 yards base width beside the river. Clay and gravel was dug out of
the west side and piled up in a dyke on the east and at the north end. The
north-west corner was excavated to the lowest level, and thence a leat ran
beneath Priory Road to a small pond which was also supplied by a long leat from
the Chinn. After turning the two wheels the water was below river level, and it
returned to the Cole along a tailrace of slight gradient, into which the
diverted Chinn debouched. The mill was destroyed by fire in the early 1920s. The
pool and its environs were bought by the City from the Taylor Estate and opened
as a public park. Banks were concreted and the outflow filled in: sluices were
installed at the upper and lower ends of the pool. Skiffs and a motorboat, paths
and flowerbeds, were added amenities. By 1975 two of the three islands were
accessible from the banks, the whole upper end of the pool being silted up. It
was then drained and dredged, huge amounts of material being removed. When the
pool was refilled by the headrace, the islands were once again safe refuges for
birds. Re-stocked with carp the pool is a favourite resort for fishermen as it
has been for most of its two centuries of placid existence: there are waterfowl
in abundance and a wide variety of trees and plants to interest the naturalist.
SWANSHURST POOL
(GROVE, MOSELEY NEW, SWANSHURST SLADE POOL) was made in or before 1759 by one
Henry Giles as a fishpond: he constructed an earth dam across the small but
relatively deep valley of a tiny brook which used to rise near the top of Brook
Lane. A hatchery pond was dug beside the dam. The name 'Moseley' is incorrect:
it was applied to several sites on the west side of Swanshurst Quarter in
Yardley, probably because they were the property of the Moseley family of Grevis.
It was called 'New' Pool to distinguish it from three pools on the adjacent
Coldbath Brook. The 'grove' is the clump of beech trees on the north bank. In
the 1930s the dam collapsed and had to be rebuilt with a central outflow. Since
1922 the 4¼-acres pool and the fields beside it have been a public park, bought
from the 'squires' of Yardley, the Taylors, of whose Ivyhouse Farm they were
part.
COLDBATH is shown
on an estate plan of 1750. The steep valley of Coldbath or Bulley Brook, which
rises near the top of Cambridge Road, Kings Heath, has been dammed to make four
main pools and some ponds. This, formerly the largest, was 6 acres water
surface, but has been allowed to silt up until it is only half that. It was
constructed as a fishpond, both for sport and for cash crops. The Grevises owned
it until 1766 when John Taylor, wealthy manufacturer in Birmingham, bought their
lordship and estates. Moseley Golf Club acquired part of the lakeside in 1892
and the rest between 1902 and 1919. There is no public access to the attractive
but neglected lake.
LADY MILL POOL is
shown on the 1750 estate plan referred to above. As the mill was so named
because its income was in part devoted to the maintenance of St. Mary’s Church
in Moseley - 'Our Lady' - it may well have been pre-Reformation. Certainly it
was there in 1689, and so would be its pool, immediately below Cold Bath.
Yardley Wood Road, formerly Stoney Lane, crossed the valley on its dam, a
convenient causeway. The mill went out of use about 1830, and the 2½-acre pool
shrank. A small pond survived until 1925 when the road was raised. Prefabs,
since demolished, and more recent development have practically obliterated the
poolbed. On the east side of the road were several ponds, whereby pollarded
willows grew - the osier beds of 1750.
'DELL POOL' is
recorded as 'Old Pool' in a Rental Roll of 1781 and appears on a Taylor Estate
plan of 1807. It probably postdates the rebuilding of Sarehole Mill after 1768,
being a reserve of water about four times greater than the one-acre pool at the
mill. In the 1890s the earth dam was leaking and its collapse seemed imminent,
so the central brick sluice was broken down and the pool allowed to drain away.
Springs continued to flow into the valley and much of the poolbed has stayed
boggy. Wetland trees and plants have grown unhindered for nearly a century in
what has become known, for no good reason, as 'Moseley Bog'. Development
proposals for land on its north side seemed likely to cause its drying out: a
campaign to 'Save Our Bog' has apparently been successful, and an interesting
area of natural landscape survives.
SAREHOLE MILLPOOL
is surprisingly small compared with Titterford Pool, but the main reserve for
the mill was on the valley side, in 'Old Pool'. The millpool was embanked, not
excavated, in the Coleside meadow: its dam was strengthened by the brick mill
and workshop built against it in or after 1768. There must have been a pool
thereabout, since the first mill was erected before the Dissolution of
monasteries - it paid a fee to Maxstoke Priory - fed only by Coldbath Brook.
After the cessation of milling in 1919 the pool became silted and overgrown.
Fifty years later it was partly cleared and dredged: its water, still supplied
by Coldbath Brook as the Cole leat is largely destroyed, again turns the wheels
of the restored mill, and ducks float upon it once more.
GREET MILLPOOL was
formed by the ponded river in the 13th century. At a nick-point, a natural break
of slope, a stone weir was built across the river, to create a reserve of water
and a good fall past a simple paddle-wheel. When the mill was rebuilt in 1776 it
was built over a brick conduit between the weired river channel and an overflow
leat. The pool then covered about three acres at greatest: its banks were still
traceable until the river was re-coursed a decade or so ago. Greet Mill was
always at the mercy of the mills upstream: when they diverted the river into
their pools, its reserve dwindled rapidly and was in dry weather below the top
of the weir. Probably because of this the mill was out of use by 1843 and
demolished before 1868. The sluice of the overflow leat was permanently open and
the river ran down it, the weired channel becoming silted. The boggy poolbed was
properly drained in 1914 when the new stone-lined course was made beneath the
new bridge, and the meadows were used as allotments during and between two wars.
Now they are open to the public as part of the Riverside Walk.
DANFORD LAKE on
Sparkbrook existed in Georgian times if not before. The lane now called Golden
Hillock Road crossed the brook on its dam. It was a fishpond of perhaps 2-3
acres water surface. When the Warwick Canal was cut in 1792 a feeder was taken
from the brook near Stratford Road, and this may have so reduced the flow as to
cause the lake to dry up. It is not shown on the O.S. Field Sheet of c. 1817.
HAY MILL POOLS The
1495 Presentment refers to the 'Poole taile of Haye Mill' which had probably
been in existence for 2-3 centuries by that date. The mill stood at the
confluence of the Cole and Tyseley Brook alias River Lee, its small triangular
pool fed by both. By 1835 a larger mill was built about 150 yards downstream
with a bigger pool: this had been drained by 1887, waterpower having given way
to steam two decades earlier. The upper and earlier pool survived as a pond
until the Waste Disposal unit was built on a great concrete raft across its
site: but the lower pool has been partly restored as an oblong pond beside the
unit. There were two other narrow pools on the Cole in the mid-19th century, one
between the embankments of the canal and railway, and the other south of the
latter. They are long gone, reduced to a channel between spoil banks, but two
other meres have been made recently: as part of the nature reserve in 'The
Ackers' a pond for fish and waterfowl has been dug out near the Cole/Lee
confluence, and below the W.D.U. a balancing lake regulates the flow of the
river.
YARDLEY (WOOD
MILL, WASH MILL) This was probably the mill which Roger Bradewell built in 1385,
so called not because of its material but because it stood near the densest
patch of forest in the manor. The next certain reference to it is that of 1797.
Maps of last century show the pool to have been about three acres in extent, fed
by a race more than half a mile long, which took in two rills descending from
Red Hill. The mill went out of use early this century, and the pool was drained
when a municipal estate was built alongside in the 1920s. Its still wet bed was
used as a dump for bomb rubble and levelled in 1957. New development covers most
of the site.
'OLD MILL POOL' is
shown on Beighton's Map. Its position and size are confirmed by the Yardley and
Solihull Tithe Maps of 1843: it was then 'Pool Meadow' on both sides of the
boundary brook, and 'Mill Close' was the next croft downstream on the Solihull
side. The pool was of about two acres: its banks can still be traced fairly
accurately between Watwood and Dunard Roads, Shirley.
BROOMHALL MILL
POOLS A quarter-mile north of the site of ancient Broom Hall the brook which
rises near Stratford Road at Robin Hood splits into two channels, which by
Georgian times had been dammed to make narrow pools. The northenmost was a
fishpond: the latter, employing a short steep fall, powered a small corn mill.
Though it was probably much older, there is no surviving record of it before
1778. A century later it was out of use. Both pools, much silted, were in-filled
prior to the opening of Fox Hollies Park in 1936, and a concrete cascade was
made down the stream bed.
ROUND POOL is an
oddity, a pond which is embanked rather than excavated. It existed in 1783 as a
fishpond, and is still the same today.
LYNE LAKE is named
in the 1609 Presentment: it was presumably at the junction of Lyndon Green and
Smarts Hill Brooks, partly in Yardley and Sheldon, near the junction of Barrows
and Moat Lanes.
After heavy rain
there is a large pool, beneath the playing field between the site of Lady Mill
and Moseley Bog: this is formed in a great underground tank built to accommodate
surface drainage from Kings Heath until the sewers are able to disperse it.
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