We are indebted to Dr Edmund Deane for the knowledge of the “discovery” of Tewit Well, as his 1626 book Spadacrene Anglica refers to the discovery by William Slingsby ‘of fifty five yeers agoe’, More significantly, Deane also refers to the promotion of Slingsby’s well by Dr Timothy Bright who, in c. 1596, named it ‘the English Spaw’. This is the first use of the name ‘Spa’ applied to an English resort.
The mineral properties of the well discovered by Slingsby in 1571 came at the precise time that such discoveries were being made throughout England. Throughout the 1570’s there was a positive mania for uncovering new mineral wells because of a government suspicion that continental wells were the resort of malcontents and pro Catholic plotters. The wider availability of native wells with genuine curative powers, was therefore encouraged.
The popular name for England’s first spa was ‘Tewit’, a north country term for the peewit, which flocked around the well’s rim to peck salt globules which formed from the chalybeate (iron) water.
Dr Bright’s description of Bilton with Harrogate’s new well was to have far reaching consequences, as ‘the English Spaw’ was both unique and patriotic. Dr Bright was for a time the personal physician to Queen Elizabeth I, and was exceptionally well placed to promote the well discovered by his friend Slingsby.
Slingsby had the well head walled and flagged with stone, and subsequently became an assiduous drinker of the water, as did physicians and their patients from as far away as York