St Anne's Hill, Chertsey

It's been years since I've been to St Anne's Hill near Chertsey. A few months ago I took part in a National Trust-organised symposium on sacred landscape and memory and decided to talk about St Anne's Well on the hill and the layering of history there - Bronze Age activity, Iron Age hillfort, early medieval vineyard, 14th-century chapel site and fair location, and all sorts of other things, ending in its modern incarnation as a public park, to which families come in search of somewhere for the children to run around, enthusiasts in search of history or pseudo-history, and occult investigators in search of ghosts. 

The Surrey Paranormal Society spent a night scaring themselves next to the Well a few years ago with all their instruments to record bumps and noises, drops in temperature and the like, and I lifted an image from their video which you can find on LiberFaciorum. In correspondence with them they said they'd found what they believed to be the remains of the medieval chapel, which are supposed to be somewhere in the vicinity of Reservoir Cottage on the hilltop, so being in the area today I went back for a look around. I couldn't see anything that suggested ancient remains (I reckon the Ordnance Survey has simply copied that detail, 'Remains of Chapel', onto its maps from edition to edition over the years and it doesn't mean there's much there), but it remains a haunting, haunted landscape. It's has the same isolation, the sense of being a separate world, as other wooded hilltop sites such as St Catherine's Hill in Dorset, or Alderley Edge, though I've never been there. Ringed by paths, you can look out from the beacon site as far as the hills north of London, taking in Heathrow Airport on the way. Southwood House on the southern slope keeps the folly spirit admirably alive with its little brick, flint and tile gazebo, and in The Dingle is a gigantic ball of tree root turned into a work of art.

I've never experienced the eerie sensations some other people have reported at the Well. Whatever sense of melancholy I feel have there arises from the state of the place itself. The old 'Nun's Well' illustrated in a mid-Victorian history of Chertsey was, at some time subsequent to 1853 when that was published, replaced by a domed structure made of brick, flint and tufa which so closely resembles others of its type across the country you might suspect it was ordered from a folly catalogue. The waters were deemed good for the eyes, as so many holy wells were, but I wouldn't allow the rank brown stuff that fills the Well now anywhere near any part of me, least of all my eyes. I think it's little more than a receptacle of stagnant sludge, sad to say.