Legends of the Sinjen stone

“We knew it as St John’s Well, pronounced by the villagers as ‘Sinjen Well’, and the constant flow was beautifully clear water, presumably filtered by the magnesian limestone,” writes Geoff Carr of Aycliffe Village who grew up in Merrington.

“Next to it was a large boulder of very smooth rock, but we didn’t give it a name.

“However, it did have its own legend, maybe a few, but the one we spoke of related to the notorious Brass murders which took place along the road toward Ferryhill.”

WELL RESTORED: Tom Dixon cannot hide his joy at the restoration of the "Sinjen spring" in Kirk Merrington in April 1986

These murders were committed by Andrew Mills who at Christmas 1683, driven by the devil’s voice inside his head, killed three of the Brass children. It was a doubly despicable crime, because Mills had been living with the Brass family and they had come to trust him.

“The story was that the murder weapon had been buried beneath the stone,” continues Geoff. “This is highly unlikely as that weapon was said to be an axe, and the stone was impossible to move.

“We nevertheless spent many hours trying to dislodge it, using branches as levers, pouring lots of water from the spring under it, but all in vain.”

The same story was told by correspondent Peter Howe, and local historian Ann Arthur sent in a newspaper cutting about it, so there was clearly something to it.

The first photograph was taken in April 1986 and showed Sinjen Well back in flowing action. It had become lost when Aycliffe contractor John Wade bought the arable fields behind St John’s Church in which the spring sprung, and had ploughed them over, ready for crops. In the process, the spring was diverted and the smooth rock, which some people called “the witches’ stone”, was buried.

The Northern Echo said: “Kirk Merrington was in uproar when the rock, said to date back to the 1300s and visited by generations of schoolchildren, mysteriously vanished.”

Mr Wade said: “I didn’t know it had any historical interest to anybody. It was just a boulder in a field.”

But to Merringtonians it was also known as “the douching stone”. Centuries of women had washed their clothes in the clean-running spring and then had used the stone as a dryer, presumably beating the water out on it which is why, over time, it had become so smooth.

Hearing of the importance of the stone, Mr Wade promised to make good the loss. First of all, he managed to get St John’s Well flowing again – hence the picture of our friend looking at the gushing pipe with such delight.

A month later, the Witches’ Stone re-emerged, and this time all of the male elders of the village were photographed watching as Tom Dixon prodded it with his stick.

The Echo report did not make any mention of Andrew Mills’ murderous axe being discovered, but it concluded: “Now resident Tom Dixon, 57, of Hallgarth, Kirk Merrington, will urge the town council to move the boulder into the village and have a plaque put on it to honour its significance to the community.”

So what became of the stone? Memories recently hauled its way on its bike up to Kirk Merrington but couldn’t see any douching stone, or any witches come to that. Please let us know.

HAPPY TIMES: Sheila Skaife on the Sinjon stone in Kirk Merrington in 1951, when she was courting her husband, Gordon

FOR Gordon and Sheila Skaife in Stanley, the mention of the Sinjen stone and well in Kirk Merrington brought back happy memories.

“We often went down those fields when we were courting back in 1951, until we married in 1953,” says Gordon. “We were told the stone had been there since the Ice Age.” In those days, the stone was about 25 metres east of the well.

Memories knows very little about geology, but in Teesdale and Darlington there are many inexplicably large and smooth boulders. These are “glacial erratic porphyrys” – giant lumps of igneous rock that were moved from the top of Shap Fell in Cumbria down the Tees Valley by glaciers in the last Ice Age, up to 80,000 years ago. As they rolled down the valley, the ice rubbed them smooth, and when the ice melted, they fell to earth and haven’t moved since.

Bulmer’s Stone, in Darlington’s Northgate, is an erratic porphyry, and there’s another in the town’s South Park – the Manson monument – which was shifted from the River Tees at Winston. There’s another fine specimen on the riverbank west of Gainford, in the shadow of the railway bridge – in fact, it is supposed to have been used as an anchor for the timber scaffolding when the bridge was built in the mid-1850s.

Was the Sinjen stone such a traveller?