page_title: Bloak
section_title: Bloak Well
hierarchical_section_title: Bloak / Bloak Well
caption_attribution_description: The Bloak Well near Auchentiber in Ayrshire. The building is now called Salt Well Cottage.
context_page_description: Bloak was a hamlet or clachan in East Ayrshire, Parish of Stewarton, Scotland. The habitation was situated between Auchentiber and Stewarton on the B778. It was originally built as a row of housing for crofters and farm workers. A small school remained open for some years after the hamlet ceased to exist.
context_section_description: Paterson (1866) states that there is a mineral spring near Stewarton, called the Bloak Well. gives the Scot's word 'blout' as meaning the 'eruption of fluid' or a place that is soft or wet. Both meanings would fit in this context. Blout and Bloak are very similar words, with Bloak Moss close by as well as the South and East Bloakhillhead farms.
  A well recorded as Bloak Well was first discovered in 1800, around 1826 (Paterson 1866) or 1810 or 1800, by the fact that pigeons from Lainshaw House and the neighbouring parishes were found to flock here to drink. Mr. Cunningham of Lainshaw built a handsome house over the well in 1833 and appointed a keeper to take care of it as the mineral water was of some value owing to healing properties attributed to it. The well was located in the middle of the kitchen. In 1846 the hamlet of Bloak is recorded as having a mineral well.  The cottage, along with Lugton Farm and the associated land was purchased, from the Lainshaw Estate, and added to Wardlaw Farm around 1920 by John Miller who farmed Wardlaw at the time.  He refurbished and extended in the cottage in the 1930s as a retirement home but failed to persuade his wife to move there.  The cottage was let rent free for a number of years as John hoped, in vain, that it would eventually become the retirement home.  Saltwells as it was then known returned to family use in 1947 when John's newly married youngest son and his wife moved in.  Over the next 40 years the name of the cottage, changed to Saltwell then back to Saltwells following conflicting advice from researchers of local history.
caption: A view of Bloak Well, now called 'Salt Well'.
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