Grantham Spa was as popular as Bath

In the fields at the back of Spittlegate Mill was a chalybeate spring known as Grantham Spa, writes Ruth Crook of Grantham Civic Society.

In the 1700s it was as popular as Bath and was where people could take the waters. There was accommodation for travellers in the vicinity and people with a variety of medical conditions would take the waters because of its supposed health properties.

A chalybeate spring was also known as ferruginous waters, which were spring waters containing salts of iron. Some of the water pipes to the wells in the town centre had to be replaced in the 1800s from lead, which was commonly used at that time, to copper, as the hard water rotted the pipes.

In the 17th century a physician in Tunbridge Wells at the spa there said that the waters could cure ‘the colic, the melancholy, and the vapours; it made the lean fat, the fat lean; it killed flat worms in the belly, loosened the clammy humours of the body, and dried the over-moist brain’.

The waters at Tunbridge Wells were analysed in 1967 and found to contain iron carbonate, manganese carbonate, calcium sulphate, magnesium sulphate, magnesium chloride, sodium chloride and potassium chloride.