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.
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.
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