Ralph Sponer lived at the stone house known as Moor Hall Farm in 1550. This house, in Moor Hall Drive, is traditionally supposed to be the birthplace of Bishop Vesey, who built his mansion of Moor Hall nearby in 1525. The 1525 Moor Hall was built of brick, and the clay to make the bricks may have been extracted from land beside Moor Hall Farm, where there is now a large pool.
Moor Hall and its grounds lay at the edge of the fields belonging to the hamlet of Little Sutton; these had been common fields in the middle ages, but were beginning to be divided up into separate fields by the 1540s. Responsibility for maintaining the field drains and giving access to drinking water for animals transferred from the community in general to private individuals. The half-yearly Court Leet of Sutton had to settle the inevitable disputes.
The court held in April 1549 found that “John Harman gent Warden of Sutton, William Smythe, John Rychards, Thomas Ketyll, John Smythe and William Gybbons dammed and diverted the watercourse flowing from Ralph Sponer’s land to Sutton to the loss of the inhabitants of Sutton” and fined them accordingly. This little stream, which flows across the golf course to the bottom of Tamworth Road and then to Coleshill Street, passed through land owned by the people named, including land belonging to the newly-founded Bishop Veseys Grammar School.
The problem recurred in 1558 and 1567, where the stream is said to flow from “Sponer’s house to the Blobbes”, while in October 1571 the court ordered every inhabitant to scour the ditches on their land next to the watercourse flowing from Wall Pool to the Blabbs. In dry weather the pool next to Moor Hall Farm, known as Wall Pool, supplied drinking water for animals; in 1556 the Court “ordered John Cartwright to repair the dam at Wall Pool so that his neighbours may have water therein for their cattle”. Similar orders continued to be made for the next fifty years.
The little stream was still useful to farmers early in the twentieth century, providing water for a sheepwash just below Moor Hall Drive. Wall Pool is still there, home to the rare natterjack toad, but no longer accessible to the public and their cattle
