Description: St Chad's Well is said to be where the Mercian saint had a cell. Here he led a life of religious solitude, preaching, healing people in the sacred waters of a spring, and baptizing his converts to Christianity. By the 16th century the well had become a popular place for pilgrimage.
The octagonal stone structure seen here was erected in the 1830s by local physician James Rawson, the date carved above the doorway DCLXIX (669 CE) being the year Chad became Bishop of Lichfield. The well dried up in the early 1920s but the water supply was maintained by fitting a pump. In the 1950s the stone building was demolished and replaced by a wooden canopy.
The boy in the picture may be the photographer's (Derby-based postcard producer F W Scarratt) son Alec.
Image numbered in F W Scarratt's own series as No 989.