A catalogue of the extensive collection of documents relating to the estate associated with Dudley Castle is now on line through the Black Country History website, after Lottery funding paid for the cataloguing over the previous year or so. From it, all kinds of snippets are emerging about Black Country history that have been difficult to access up to now.
There's a document of 1596, ref DE/4/7/8/9, in which Edward Sutton, Lord Dudley, grants a 21-year lease to his brother John of a 'Brine or Salt pit at Pensnett and liberty to work same'. The lease was to end if/when John paid Edward a hundred pounds; it looks like a cash-generating scheme for Edward, rather than a serious assessment of how much could be made from the pit - from extracting salt, presumably. Edward had made John Keeper of Pensnett Chase the previous year.
From its location on Pensnett Chase, and the rarity of springs in this area with a potentially commercial concentration of salt, this pretty well has to be what became Saltwells Spa. The area is now a nature reserve; see
http://www.dudley.gov.uk/resident/environment/countryside/nature-reserves/saltwells-local-nature-reserve-/history-of-saltwells-local-nature-reserve/
for a history of the reserve area. I can't remember seeing a reference to the salt spring as early as 1596, and clearly Dudley didn't know about it when this history was written. Dr Robert Plot noted the mineral content of the water in 1636, and there were later attempts to extract salt; see also http://www.cradleylinks.com/spa.html
and
https://uptheossroad.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/taking-the-wates/
The wording suggests that there was no intention to create a saline spa in 1596, but to 'work' the water from the spring. The use of the word 'pit', as at Droitwich, suggests salt extraction as the use - in fact, that the pit was already created and in use. I don't have a date for the earliest occurrence of 'Saltwells', but the name isn't used (as I'd expect it to be) in the 1596 document. There are no documents in the Dudley Estate collection before the 19th C that use the name 'Saltwells'.
The 19th spa was rather a flop, and salt extraction doesn't seem to have been a great success previously. The area was mostly trashed in 19th C coal mining, instead; loads of Estate documents about damaged land at Saltwells. The spring just wasn't quite saline enough to be commercial, especially with Droitwich not far to the south and the Cheshire sources to the north. I don't know what the geology is. Dudley borough's is hugely complex.
Are you there, Bea? One for you especially, I suspect.
Christine B
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