Johnny Blue’s Well

When I was a child our family went for long walks on Sunday afternoons.  We were picked up by our parents from Sunday school and walked all round the countryside which is now near the Dams to Darnley county park.
This is Johnny Blues’s Well on the back road to Neilston.  The area was rich in calico weaving, dying and printing in Victorian times and according  to local tradition, Johnny Blue was a print maker in the dye works who walked past the well going home from Neilston and reputedly washed the blue dye off himself there.  His real name was James Ferguson, he was a poet  and he came from the nearby village of Gateside.
I remember being warned in the infant class at school that we were never to drink fom wells because of the risk of tuberculosis.