Lion Head Spring, Forest Row

Down a muddy lane in the Wealden village of Forest Row lies the Lion Head Spring. It’s a very fine well indeed: stone walls and benches surround the round spring basin on three sides, while the eponymous lion’s head pours water into the pool. When I saw it this week, there were (relatively) fresh flowers lying in front of the basin, remains of candles around, clootie ribbons tied onto the yew tree that overshadows the well, and even some printed Buddhist prayer flags. You can find online lots of lovely pictures of the well decorated with flowers in jugs and vases, or with petals gently circulating in the water (here, for instance, here, or here). This is clearly a well-visited site. But why, and by who?

There wasn’t much to Forest Row apart from an inn beside the turnpike road and a few cottages until the railway arrived in 1866. The well doesn’t appear even on the largest-scale Ordnance Survey maps; though strangely the recess it’s set in does, at least from 1897 – it isn’t shown in 1873. Between those two dates we have Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887, a good date for monuments of this kind to be erected, and the fabric of the well, as well as the lion’s head, looks right for that sort of time. However we might have expected some kind of inscription or dedication if it was indeed a Jubilee memorial.

You will come across suggestions online that the lion inspired CS Lewis to create Aslan, the Christ-figure of the Narnia stories. Naturally I pooh-poohed this at first, but in fact it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. Among Lewis’s early Oxford friends were the artist Cecil Harwood, who later became associated with the Steiner educational movement which, after WWII, was established at Kidbrooke Park in Forest Row, yards from the well. Harwood died at the house in the village he shared with his second wife Marguerite in 1975. Lewis was also friends with the philosopher Owen Barfield, who spent his last years in the late 1980s at a residential home in Forest Row, an odd choice if he had no existing connections with the place. Both Harwood and Barfield were Lewis’s executors, and The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter. Lewis was conceiving of the Narnia narrative in 1948, just enough time for him to make a trip to see Harwood at Forest Row and find the lion’s head. However, Lewis always claimed he didn’t know where the idea for Aslan had come from, and as he had no reason to obfuscate, the lion at Forest Row is probably a coincidence.

The Parish Council owns the well, and also a plot of land at the top of the lane: they call it Gilham Spring, rather than referring to the Lion in any way. Many people seem keen to drink the water, even if the Council very much say they shouldn’t, at least not without boiling it, and the Friends of the River Medway advise the same. Some enthusiastic souls saw fit to vandalise the sign near the well telling them not to drink it (a sign which I didn’t see on my visit). This is an issue that regularly pops up on the LiberFaciorum Holy Wells page, among those anxious to avoid drinking what comes out of the tap, to the extent of claiming that a spring filtering through a disused graveyard in a city centre ‘can’t be any worse than tap water’, which of course it very, very much can be.

Not far away from the Lion Head Spring is Plaw Hatch Farm, which has its own filtered spring where visitors are welcome to fill up their bottles. Plaw Hatch is a biodynamic farm operating under the aegis of the St Anthony’s Trust, closely linked to the Steiner set-up at Kidbrooke since the 1970s, and some visitors clearly make a joint pilgrimage both to the Lion Head Spring and to the rather safer supply at the farm. I wonder whether this gently alternative spiritual presence is why the well has achieved its prominence, when its history is so obscure and probably not very long at that.