The River Path The River Path
Some Watery Features of the Stour
The Blackmore Vale oozes with springs which usually indicate a change in the geology. Mere is a good case in point. Along the fault line where the Kimmeridge clay and chalk meet, springs emerge mysteriously. These are the sources of the Shreen and Ashfield Waters - the streams which add to the particularity of the town and to the volume of the Stour.
Names give clues to where springs are or have been - Holwell, Wellhead (wella, wiell = Old English for water which wells up or out).
"The water from chalk springs is constantly close to the annual mean air temperature of 10 to 11 degrees centigrade and this stabilizes the stream temperatures keeping the water relatively warm in winter and cool in summer." (Dr Mike Ladle at the Institute of Freshwater Ecology at East Stoke
The Stock Water in North Dorset has a small waterfall (top, left), which people can walk from Gillingham to see.
Well dressing isn't an act of prudishness but of thanksgiving for clean water. Now we have water on tap, we take its supply and purity for granted. Wells are either uncared for, filled in or covered over - such as Tatton's Well in Christchurch, once renowned for its pure water capable of curing eye ailments.
It is wonderful to find that St Mary's Well (Mary is often associated with wells) at Stalbridge (left) still gushes spring water out of the churchyard wall and at All Saints at Kington Magna, while the By Leave water only drips, a few feet away water is gushing out of the wall - but only to disappear again down a drain in the road.
In the villages of the Derbyshire limestone, dressing well ceremonies still take place over the summer. Floral tableaux are placed around the wells, the petals pushed into damp clay often depicting biblical scenes. Here you can read more about well dressing.
Are our memories of the hard work associated with water collection too remote for us to really value our springs and wells? Perhaps it will need a generation with no folk memory of them, or a long period of drought for us to value the well spring.
The water supply to Shatterwell in Wincanton (top, centre) was disrupted by the building of as railway in the 19th century.
Fords proliferate in the Stour valley (left, Tarrant Monkton, right, Fifehead Neville). Often a place name will give away the site of a ford. Are there still two fords, for example, in Twyford?
Water pumps at Stalbridge (left and top right) and Edmondsham (right)
Old sheepwashes - at Cann on the Boyne Brook (left) and at Burton on Ashfield Water (right)
