PURTON SPA / SALTS HOLE

Purton Spa Swindon Advertiser Monday 31st October 1859

Photo courtesy of Colin Savage

Photo courtesy of Colin Savage

Purton Spa ad in the Swindon Advertiser Monday 18 March 1861

Purton Spa Swindon Advertiser Monday 26th November 1860

Swindon Advertiser 1860




The spa’s heyday was between 1859 and 1870. It was never a true spa – there was no social life surrounding it, no assembly rooms, hotels, attractions and social whirl. All there was was an octagonal pump-room over the well, a manager’s house (Spa House beside the well) and for a brief time a boarding house in Purton, which was there so briefly that nobody now seems to know where it stood.

In 1860 MASON of Old Swindon was the local agent.

Contemporary writers about Purton work hard to find positive things to say about the Spa. They describe the water as 'Clear and bright, resembling ordinary spring water. There is scarcely any odour or taste whatever.' And that would have been    very welcome to those used to the assertively-flavoured Bath waters, for example.

They mention the fine air, the quietness of the village which is so attractive to 'those whose minds need the solace which only perfect rest from the harassing cares of busy every-day life can give'. Much is made of the fact that Purton 'boasts a
station of its own'; and that Dr Sadler is at hand to supervise the daily regimen of the invalids seeking a cure. But the picture which emerges very strongly is that of a commercialised medicinal spring in a very rural community with little or no social life to attract those who like a little diversion with their medicine (Anon. 1881, p.4; P. de V. 1879, p.7).

The Spa waters were bottled and sent to all parts of the country and to the continent between 1869 and 1880; and this trade was resumed in the next phase of the spa’s life.


When he retired from the army in 1921, Sergeant Fred Neville bought Spa House, and began selling the water along with his own produce, in the villages round about, first by pony and trap and later by car. From 1927 to 1952 bottled Purton Spa water was commercially available once again. Unlike the Victorian bottles, which were stoneware – one survives in Devizes museum –  Neville’s bottles were clear glass with an authoritative label showing the Voelcker analysis and the recommended 'Ordinary dose: Half-pint at bed-time, and the same, or more, an hour before breakfast the following morning, subject to variation according to nature of disease and effects produced.'

Like Dr Sadler, Fred Neville got the water professionally analysed. Purton museum has the letters sent him by the Pathologist of the Royal Mineral Water Hospital in Bath, whose name is almost illegible but appears to be John W. Munro. His 1929 analysis checked for radioactivity and iodine content. When    fresh, the water is 'sensibly radio-active', that is, it contains radon gas at a concentration of 0.165 millimicrocurie per litre. It contains 262.57 gamma units of iodine, which Munro stresses is 'an important factor from a medical point of view'. Nowadays we know all too much about it, and we look askance at radioactivity, but at this period it was a fashionable healing attribute.

Neville stopped delivering locally during the 1940s when petrol rationing, a 20% tax on table water, and the ready availability of liver salts conspired to make the Spa water a relatively expensive commodity. The last entry in the ledger records a consignment of water sent out by rail in June 1952 (Compiled from 
Robbins (1991), pp.97-8, and documents and objects in Purton museum).