Just Don't Go There

About thirteen years ago I walked through a gap in a hedge beside a fairly busy B-road and along a track at the edge of a field that led to a wood, where, to my surprise, I found one of the most spectacular holy wells (using the term loosely) that I've ever seen. A great Gothic archway set into a bank led to a inner chamber where a gargoyle's head spouted water into a basin. It wasn't in very good condition and looked for all the world as though nobody had set eyes on it in years. I'd certainly never seen a picture of it, though I'd read its name a long time before: it appeared on the map simply marked as 'spring'. In fact, while the well had had a healing reputation recorded in the 18th century, the site as it now appears is a Victorian folly and quite possibly the grandest thing of its kind in the UK, rivalled only, perhaps, by St Bernard's Well beside the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. 

I was so astonished that no record of this site had ever appeared, anywhere, apart from those brief antiquarian mentions, that I popped it on my website. I was aware that technically I shouldn't have been there and felt a bit uncomfortable about this, so I was always very reticent about where the well actually was. I only returned once, a few months after my initial discovery, to show Dr Bones whose clergyman father also had a habit of ending up where he had no legal business being in pursuit of some interesting or unusual feature of the landscape. I didn't know who might own the site though I guessed it might be the farm a little distance off, and decided that if I ever went back it should be more legitimately. A couple of times I called at the farm gate; I phoned; I think I even wrote a letter. I was never able to contact anyone, and in the end let it go. Some years later I noticed that the gap in the hedge had been filled in, and coupled with some new business ventures beginning around the farm I concluded it might have new owners who were a bit more active than the old.

Nevertheless that slight sense of discomfort didn't quite go away, and was justified when I got an email this week from the farm - the farm business, not from an individual - pointing out that I had been trespassing, that my photographs had been taken illegally and requesting I remove any reference to the well as it had suffered unwelcome attention from vandals. They were clearly quite annoyed. I got the sense that I might not have been the only person they'd contacted, and sure enough other online references to the well have disappeared too, a local history website now pointing out that the site is private and inaccessible. I do take the line that the kind of property rights involved in the ownership of land for production (of whatever) is different from that implicated in property for personal use, and though I have sometimes found myself in places where I am not technically entitled to be I have always prepared my defence of a) doing no harm and b) delusion. But it was a fair cop really. I wrote to apologise and the email I received in acknowledgement was much friendlier.

I first became captivated by hidden and historical places of interest in the landscape when they really were that. You only found out about them by accident, from stray references on maps and things like books. I realise now that I still inwardly inhabit that period, not taking account enough of the fact that now, after decades of attention by similar souls, all this information is everywhere, all the time, part of the wonder and the woe of the internet. It was a different world back then.