In the 1980s and 1990s, fundraising took the form of well dressings. On the first Bank Holiday of May, wells were decorated in the standard Derbyshire manner: a wooden frame is filled with clay, a design (often Biblical, as the root of the festival is Christian thanksgiving for the well) pricked out and outlined with black wool, and then the spaces filled in with flower petals, onion skins (for human skin), alder cones, red peppers (looks like leather when it has weathered) etc. etc.  In Dale’s case, the designs were created by Mrs Elizabeth Bacon from Dale Moor, the clay puddled by her daughter Leah and our daughter Elizabeth in an old bath in Abbey House’s orchard, and the decorative work done in the Site Museum on the abbey site by anybody who liked to come along and lend a hand. The weekend was completed with a brass band and cream teas and stalls, and usually a sum in four figures was given to various charities. All this stopped when my husband and I moved temporarily to Cheshire for me to take up work there.

There were many wells in Dale. There was one roughly where the current litter bin is sited, near the triangle: when we came to live here in 1983, this well still had a pump mechanism, but it did not function; it had been the school’s water supply for many years. Other wells included the Hermit’s Well (on private land near the bottom of the churchyard), one in the yard of Verger’s Farm, a spring at the bottom of the orchard connected with Hagg House, which never froze, one in the school playground which they used for hand-washing, one in the driveway of Abbey House (according to the memory of Dr George Futers), one in the north-west corner of Abbey House’s orchard, and the Abbey’s well. This is on the boundary line between Abbey House and Manor House (which used to be one single house) and is now mostly covered by a coalbunker; but the old lady who lived in Abbey House until 1982 used the water from the well, pumping it through a galvanised pipe into Abbey House’s kitchen. There are doubtless many more wells still to be recorded.

Quite a few of the buildings in Dale are of considerable age. As mentioned above, Abbey House and Manor House were once one house, the Manor House, thought to be 18th century: this building incorporates a large block of masonry which was once the Abbey’s chimney, and on the west side of the house, foundations of what was probably the abbot’s lodging can be made out; the house used to be thatched (and leaked!), and an early 20th century photograph reveals that Abbey House once had a small window low down to the right hand side of the present window; a photograph from 1947 shows this present front window in the same pattern as the current bathroom window. The house passed into the hands of Stanton and Staveley in the early 20th century, as did most of the rest of the village; it was then divided into two small cottages – two-up, two-down. Both sides of the house are now privately owned.