Water at Eastbourne & Fulking

I'd forgotten to mention my visit to the south coast last week to see Ms Kittywitch. We picked our way along the beach at Eastbourne to view the Holy Well. You may remember I have already visited this site, or what is now identified as it. The problem with this Holy Well is that every time there's a major storm that sweeps shingle onto the beach it gets swamped, and that was the case in 2017. Now, though, it has once again been cleared by local enthusiasts and given a new sign, and better repays a visit, its boulder-ringed basin filled with blueish water which has made its journey through the chalk cliff above. Sorry about my photo, I don't know why I ended up taking it so wonkily.

My journey home took me within reasonable striking distance of Fulking where there is another interesting spring - not really a holy well except by adoption, in the way that Victorian decorators of such sites often linked them with divine grace by means of improving Scriptural citations, a tradition which has not completely disappeared even now. In this little Sussex village, so the tale goes, the water supply was pitiful before regular visitor John Ruskin, who sometimes joked that he had missed an alternative career as a civil engineer, and local brewer Henry Willett set up a hydraulic ram at the source of the stream next to the Shepherd & Dog pub and from there pumped water all over the village, including to a fountain a couple of hundred yards away. This site has all the details. The well-house covering the ram is an appropriately Gothic little building and, like the fountain which is a memorial to Ruskin and his ingenuity, incorporates Bible texts in lovely encaustic tiles.