Waggoners Wells

Given that it's so close to where I am, I couldn't work out why I'd never managed to make it to Waggoners Wells, just over the county boundary in Hampshire. It's only twenty minutes or so away by car, and I'd known about it for years. Last week I popped out on my day off and zoomed down the A3 to Grayshott where the beauty spot is to be found. The 'Wells' are in fact a series of three pools set in deeply wooded countryside, with a feeling of tremendous isolation and remoteness despite being only half a mile from a built-up area; and despite the fact that it was a lovely day on the whole circuit I saw only an old couple walking, a chap fishing, a man jogging with a dog, and two mums with a collection of children. The history of the site is a bit obscure: the pools are clearly artificial but while they are often explained with reference to iron working in the district there is no sign of any historic industrial activity close by. 

Next to a house just west of the topmost pool is the Wishing Well, a very pleasing spring flowing from beneath a wall as you can see in the photograph. It is said that Lord Tennyson composed 'The Flower in the Crannied Wall' here in 1863 (and a plaque calls attention to the story), and website after website will tell you that novelist Flora Thompson (assistant postmistress at Grayshott for three years around 1900) referred to it. At that time it would have looked significantly different, as you can see in this photograph and this one. In fact if the dates are accurate they imply that the well was reconstructed between 1925 and 1928 to form what seems to be a large-ish pool with a stone surround, and then again some time later in the shape we see it today, demonstrating again how a well which may look as though it's been there since time immemorial may actually be relatively recent in form. 

Flora Thompson refers to pins being dropped into the water as a wishing charm ('quite a number of them dropped in by herself'), but when she revisited the site in the 1920s (around the time of the Frith photo, therefore) she found the well much neglected and no memory of its wishing powers. It's possible that the Wishing Well is a truly ancient folkloric spring that found itself part of the 19th-century tourist circuit, but my guess is that the stories about it took off after Waggoners Wells became a popular picnicking spot. It's also worth noting that the Flora Thompson accounts seem to come from John Owen Smith's 1997 book On the Trail of Flora Thompson which argues that her novel Heatherley contains a disguised account of her time in Grayshott - which may not be entirely unproblematic.