Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Farewell RRM

The River & Rowing Museum at Henley opened the year after I arrived at Wycombe Museum. We were local authority, they were independent, but broadly speaking still within the 'social history' sector, and immediately we sort of looked to them as one of the more prestigious, grander vessels within the great fleet of British museums. The year after opening, its building won a major architectural award and it was declared National Heritage Museum of the Year. Yet despite attending a couple of events there I'd never actually done the basic thing of looking round the galleries. This holiday week I decided to remedy that - and discovered that my resolution was just as well, as in February the RRM announced its intention to close. It's been losing about £1M per annum for years and has reached the end of the road, or the river if you prefer. 

A visit reveals why, really. The place is enormous: the galleries alone are vast, and attached to them is an array of ancillary rooms for school groups and meetings which have never been fully used. It's gorgeously and imaginatively designed and considering the mainstay of the place is a sport I have minimal interest in, even I could just about see the point. Also, the extreme heterogeneity of the displays might be considered an advantage: as well as all the actual rowing stuff, there's a 'Wind in the Willows Experience' which recreates the illustrations in the book in 3-D form, an array of artworks from John Piper's time at Fawley Bottom round the corner, a gallery of contemporary riverine art, and local history material about Henley itself. But although the Museum seemed quite busy to me on Thursday, parts of it I wandered around without meeting another soul, a bit like the minerals rooms at the Natural History Museum. Nobody seemed that interested in the great John Piper, while the huge Henley Gallery, isolated from the rest of the displays by the long, narrow corridor that was the art gallery, I had entirely to myself. There's a whole room devoted to one painting - I can see why, as it's a photo-realistic image showing Henley town by a 17th-century Dutch artist full of architectural, social, and environmental information, but even so, it's a whole room devoted to one painting. Ironically, if anything survives of the RRM it's likely to be just that collection of artefacts, forming the basis for a new Museum of Henley. But what about the rest of it? Museums think of themselves as permanent, but of course they are as much a part of the flow of history as the communities or subjects they curate on behalf of the rest of us. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

2025 Museums

That is, museums I've visited this year, not two thousand and twenty-five palaces of culture. It is International Museums Day, which is no bad thing at all even if this year's theme, 'The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities' does sound like the old historian's joke that the perfect title for any work of historiography is 'Change and Continuity in an Age of Transition'. So, even though I no longer habitually post here every time I visit a museum, I would describe very briefly the ones my travels have taken me to so far this year, special exhibitions in London excepted.

1. West Berkshire Museum, Newbury

Many years ago I applied for a job at Newbury Museum, as it was then, and remember absolutely nothing about it apart from the building that houses it, the 17th-century Old Cloth Hall & Granary Store. The strongest memory from my second visit early this year is of the café where the visitor services manager acted as barista. The collection is rather the usual kind of thing you would find in a museum of its sort, though there's some impressive commitment to contemporary collecting with Greenham Common Peace Camp memorabilia (oh dear, that's not really very contemporary now, is it), and a covid vaccination centre sign. 

2. Islington Museum

Between tracing the route of the next Goth Walk and seeing my god-daughter for dinner I found I had enough time to stride down Essex Road and visit Islington Museum, which is nowhere near what you might imagine Islington to be but serves the London Borough of that name. It is basically one big room under the Library, accessed down a flight of bleak concrete steps. I was not the only visitor but I caused confusion when I approached the desk and asked if I could make a donation. A collection of radical badges, a bust of Lenin from the Town Hall (power to the people!), a cow's skull and artefacts found under the floorboards of an 18th-century house: I am so glad this museum exists in the middle of what might seem like an unpromising chunk of the capital.

3. East Grinstead Museum

I had no idea East Grinstead was the location for a pioneering plastic surgery hospital in WWII, but that's the sort of thing museums can teach you. The town museum deals with that potentially queasy topic with compassion and interest, and contains plenty of the more common stuff you'd associate with the history of a market town.

4. Leigh on Sea Heritage Centre & Museum

'Museum' is a generous title for the Old Smithy as it has only a handful of artefacts, but it is the closest this seaside town has, a collection of photographs and a reconstructed forge in an old building which adjoins 2 Plumb Cottages. The Old Leigh Society leased that from the Council to restore and display as an example of a mid-19th-century fisherman's home, but it promptly fell down and so what you see now is more a reconstruction. Still, both were free to go in and I bought lots of postcards which is one of my key performance indicators for a heritage site.  

5. Havant Museum

This is really one room with a mocked-up 1950s kitchen to one side (these seem to be eclipsing Victorian Kitchens which were the standard when I was a museum curator). There was an amusing mechanical toy involving a windmill, a yacht, and lots of cogs which I couldn't resist playing with, a graveyard-keeper's badge, and plenty of objects jammed into a small area, though I should have paid more attention to the significance of the stuffed big cat.

Happy museum-going!

Two More Museums

The whole reason I went to Maidstone last week was to pay my respects to Ta-Kush, 'the Lady of the House, Daughter of Osiris' at the Museum. As I dripped my way through the rainy streets and finally found the Museum, I found a grand Tudor house - Chillington Manor, originally - a far more impressive setting than I envisaged, even if I quickly discovered that you don't go in here, but through a modern annexe at the side.

Like Hastings Town Museum which I visited last year, but on a bigger scale, Maidstone houses different collections of stuff which it's been given over the years, and what is in fact technically an entirely separate institution, the Royal West Kent Regimental Museum. There's the Bentlif Art Gallery, the Oyler Collection of Toys and Games, Lady Brabourn's Costume Collection, two distinct huge donations of Japanese artefacts, and the Brenchley Collection of South Sea Island ethnography. It's exhausting, and means that if you don't warm to one gallery there's always something different round a corner (and there are a lot of corners). When I visited there was also a temporary display 'I Grew Up 1980s' full of things I have disturbingly clear memories of as well as dark oak rooms full of dark oak furniture and suits of armour. I could have spent much longer here had I not already been a bit worn out by my trip to Knole House in the morning. And at the centre, in her own dark alcove - appropriately the former chapel of an almshouse - is Ta-Kush. They treat her kindly now, but she was cut about after being confiscated in 1820 by Customs & Excise as they checked her for smuggled goods. The children boggled at her, and I stood in silent salute. She has come all this way across time and space, as it were, to teach us about her vanished world. I didn't photograph her.

Then on Friday last week I was in London seeing my god-daughter to hear about the frustrations of life as a very junior civil servant living in the capital and a young Christian who can't find a local church where they don't worship a drum kit. I made a day of it by exploring the City of London Cemetery in Wanstead (which has a café!) and then dropping by at Hackney Museum. As far as you can get from the model of local history museum represented by Maidstone, Hackney's is one room (they have a gallery for temporary exhibitions, but it was closed when I went) under the borough library dating from 1999. Nobody has given them hundreds of oil paintings, Japanese sword hilts or Egyptian mummies; they don't have much, but they make what they have work hard. They focus, as far as possible, on the multifarious stories of the varied people who have made their home in this part of London over the centuries. There is the paraffin stove used by a West Indian couple in their rented room in the 1950s because the landlord turned the gas off at a certain point in the day. There's a net used to catch eels from the tank at the back of an eel-and-pie shop. There's a tiny artwork made by a schoolchild showing how their parents met. There is enormous compassion and commitment. And when I visited there were lots of children enjoying the games and toys for free, and some of the older ones even looking at the displays. 

Go and find your local museum. They're all gorgeous. Well, nearly all. 

Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Having Said That ...

... I was at the V&A today to see the "Diva" exhibition, mainly tempted by PJ Harvey's Hope Six drum which is on show there, but I also dropped in at the medieval gallery and was astonished that I'd never spotted several representations of my patron saint, not Polly but St Catherine. There's an English alabaster panel showing the Martyrom, a German wooden statue, a golden reliquary, and a tiny plaque no more than an inch across.

Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.

Hastings - Wells and Others

Until yesterday I'd never been to Hastings, but decided to go at least partly because of the number of interesting wells of different kinds the town has, and have therefore jokingly referred to it as 'the Other Glastonbury'. Not that it shares the Somerset town's hippie/New Age side: its alternative scene is more punk if anything, a bit like Brighton just along the way. The town centre falls into two parts - the 19th-century resort to the west of the Castle, and the old town to its east, which is surprisingly old and picturesque.

My first stop wasn't a well but the Town Museum, on top of the hill in a castellated folly-house. It's free to go in, imaginatively laid-out and full of surprising things. I hadn't expected the ethnology displays, derived from various collectors not all of whom were Victorian adventurers, but whose bits and pieces, the museum is keen to stress, were acquired by means as ethical as they could be given the time. Mods and Rockers appear in the history galleries as do bathing costumes, fishing gear, and scary puppets, culminating in artefacts from the Green Man Festival which friends of mine attend.

Down in the old town, based in the former church of St Nicholas (patron saint of fishermen) is the Fishermen's Museum, mainly one big room with a little annexe, housing a boat, fishing paraphernalia, a wartime Doodlebug dredged from the bay, stuffed animals, and some fantastic photographs from the amazing 1890s archive of George Wood. Although the church no longer functions as such, children can still be baptised in the font (there were three last year). The Winkle Club is a Hastings charitable institution, providing the context for the suit of silver-painted winkle shells worn by 'Slugger Hoad the Winkle King'. I'm not making this up, I promise. 

I found the wells generally quite hard to find: all the online descriptions are a bit unhelpful. The Roman Bath lies in Summerfield Woods (cross the grass next to the Leisure Centre, into the woods, go left down a flight of log steps and then left again past the pools and you should find it). It's a folly that seems to have been the work of Wastel Brisco of Bohemia House nearby: there were several Wastel Briscos, surprising though that may seem, and the family derived at least part of its money from Jamaican slave plantations. The Roman Bath was once a much more extensive structure, as this full account shows, and is a bit run-down at the moment with its nasty municipal gratings. I gave it a bit of a tidy up. 

In Alexandra Park there are two mineral springs. They lie right in the north-western half of the park: follow the path past the miniature railway, keep the stream on your right and you will find them, but I wouldn't have without directions from one of the Rangers. Dr McCabe's Well is the earlier - Peter McCabe, so a plaque tells us, was an Irish doctor who became Mayor of Hastings in the 1830s and was 'a committed campaigner for clean water' - and the other Chalybeate Spring was incorporated into the park in 1880 though it was presumably identified earlier. These are both separate from St Andrew's Spa, which lay in the corner between St Helen's Road and St Helen's Park Road to the north. 

Along Rock-a-Nore in the old town lies East Well. This impressive temple-like building was also built by Dr McCabe: the museum has a painting of people drawing water from it and George Wood took a photo of children around it in the 1890s though I suspect it's a bit posed! You can still take perfectly safe water from it and I presume there is a spring that feeds the well structure. Along the seafront is a modern Wishing Well - the Rotarians manage these things in several places. Finally, next to Holy Trinity Church is the very grand if disintegrating Waldegrave Fountain, a big Gothic structure opened as a memorial to the philanthropist Countess Sarah Waldegrave in 1861, and designed by SS Teulon. 

The hardest well to find was what may be the area's original holy well, St Helen's Well about a mile and a half north of the town centre at Ore. I spent an hour wandering the roads and woods west of the ruins of the old St Helen's Church being misdirected by well-meaning locals and misinterpreting three maps before I got accurate directions. What I should have done was walk down the misleadingly-named St Helen's Park Road (it's a track) south off The Ridge, branch off left into Dunclatha Road (another dirt track at this point), and after a few yards look out for little paths leading to the left over a stream and uphill, and that's where the Well is. It's a pair of stone-lined basins, one small, one large, emptying into a pool. It's a nice spot, and its restoration in 2011 was a journey of self-discovery for one soul, though there's a slight question mark over it as it only seems to be named in Graham Jones's 1986 Landscape History paper, 'Holy Wells and the Cult of St Helen'. I also missed by yards what some local people call 'the Monk's Well', which is probably what's marked on the 1878 OS map as a 'drinking fountain', fed by the same spring. 

Finally I drove out east to the Hastings Country Park to find the Dripping Well. This turned out to be comparatively straightforward! You simply follow a marked footpath running south opposite the car park, turn right and then left, and in the little wooded glen at the bottom you'll find it, a rock in a dell with water, as the name suggests, dripping down into a shallow pool from above. It was a popular 19th-century tourist spot and there are lots of photos and prints to see online: when I worked at the Priest's House in Wimborne there was one from 1889 in a random box of stereoscope slides, and on my wall I have a much earlier print. 

But what is perhaps, just for historical reasons, the most interesting holy well in Hastings lies at the moment inaccessible in the crypt of the former church of St Mary-in-the-Castle, whose temple-like portico looms incongruously above the seafront. This is one of those bizarre Georgian churches built in the round rather than with a traditional east-west orientation, and it had a font which tapped spring water coming out of the cliff face. Even more anomalously in terms of Anglican Church history, in 1929 St Mary's created a tiled baptismal pool utilising the same spring water, and at some point the rock basin of the spring itself became a holy well complete with Biblical verses, a cup for drinking the water, and a box for donations. The church became an arts centre, but Hastings Council pulled the funding last year, and until that gets sorted, the spring will remain unseen. 

Until visiting the Museum I'd forgotten that Aleister Crowley used to live in Hastings. He allegedly said that you had to carry a hagstone if you wanted to leave the town safely, so it was just as well I found one on the beach.