A SECRET place, cool and fringed with moss, St Basil's Spring has refreshed the village of Bassaleg since the earliest times.

The Old Celts drank from it, and may well have erected the stone standing over it as both guardian and marker.

Roman legionaries, thirsty after the first leg of their march from Caerleon, refreshed themselves from it as later, did pilgrims and medieval drovers.

"The spring goes back to the earliest associations with St Basil, arguably the holy man who gave the village its name," said Stephen Rowe, a marine engineer and local historian who, with a band of like-minded souls, has restored the spring and its associated masonry and troughs to their former prominence.

"St Basil's is in the tradition of the Cornish 'clootie' wells which go back to the very earliest Celtic times, before the Romans' arrival," Mr Rowe, a Bassalegian born and bred man, continues. "Such water sources are almost always related to pagan deities which would have yielded to St Basil with the coming of Christianity."

In a brutal refutation of any spiritual values the ancient spring was covered with brick and infilled with rubble, its importance slipping from popular memory as it became grimed with the exhausts from trucks, buses and cars.

"Then, a year or so ago when the Graig Best Kept Village committee was formed, it was decided to do something about St Basil's Spring," said Marje Smart, a committee member.

"We were going to clear it out and plant some flowers but the idea of fully restoring the well gradually took over.

"The committee managed to raise a few hundred pounds and to enlist the help of a local builder and another £400 was donated by the Church in Wales fund.

"We had little idea what we would find when the modern brickwork was torn away and the rubble removed."

Fellow committee member Phyllis Rees added: "What we did see delighted us.

"The iron tank which has a feed-off to the lower water trough was still in place and holding water and much of the old stonework was in place. "It is now restored to much as it would have been in the middle of the 19th century."

Graham Miller, also a leading member of Graig Best Kept Village, believes that the well was a good starting place for a restoration of an even more profound kind.

"It has served to wake up the village as a whole to other things that need doing."

With the well project complete, there are plans for a human sundial on the village green.

Several times a year volunteers wearing yellow sashes pick up litter, and St Basil's churchyard is also being tidied up.

The aim is to win Bassaleg the Best Kept Village Contest again, within the next three years.

To this end a newsletter printed in colour is regularly produced and there is a website - www.graigvillages.co.uk - and an e-mail address, team@graigvillages.co.uk.

One cannot help thinking that St Basil, the village's patron saint, happy that the neglected well which remembers his name is now restored, is listening to these words, and beaming with delight.