The Internet is at least Partly Great and I will Defy Anyone who Says Otherwise

There’s a Holy Well at Hethfelton House near East Stoke, in Dorset, and I wanted to find out more about it. I know it appears on the first Ordnance Survey map of Dorset in 1811, but that’s it. Hethfelton House isn’t mentioned in Pevsner’s Buildings of Dorset, and there is no other clue in anything I have here. The assumption is that it was an 18th-  or early 19th-century garden feature.

Within a few minutes of discerning Googling I was able to find:

•           An article from Country Life which gave a little history of the house
•           An extract from Hutchins’s History & Antiquities of Dorset about East Stoke, with some details of the development of the Hethfelton estate
•           Both of these mentioned Dr Andrew Bain, owner of Hethfelton around the right time and the probably creator of the Well (he ‘much improved the estate and grounds’). He was also awarded the gold medal of the ‘Society of Planting’ for planting thousands of conifer trees on the estate
•           Dr Bain’s biography as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh
•           The reference to his award from, not the ‘Society of Planting’ but the Royal Society of Arts: its Transactions from the period is included in Google Books

I can't imagine how long this might have taken without the assistance of the otherwise so dreadful algorithms that rule so much of our lives; dibbing around in far-flung libraries may be pleasant, but it doesn’t half use up one’s allotted lifespan, and I might well never have found out these details at all. At such times, the tyranny of Dr Google seems benevolent indeed.