A pipe built in 1391 carried water two and a half miles from Boiling Wells to the corner of St Stephen’s Street in the city centre, formerly on the quay in the city docks, where it supplied ships leaving Bristol. Although it was never hot, the boiling wells’ turbulence and bubbling resembled boiling water. The spring can still be found, running through the nearby allotments and City Farm, but has lost much of its vigour. On the 30th of July, 1802, Robert Southey wrote to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (whom Southey had met at Westminster, and to whom he dedicated Madoc) of the Boiling Well near Stokes Croft, and its description in Thalaba the Destroyer:
They stopt, their journey done. The spring was clear, the water deep, A venturous man were he and rash That should have probed its depths, For all its loosened bed below Heaved strangely up and down, And to and fro, from side to side It heaved, and waved, and tossed, And yet the depths were clear, And yet no ripple wrinkled o’er The face of that fair Well. ll. 361-373 (eleventh book)