Ladies (Well), Kirkby Lonsdale

So, ladies and gentlemen ... here we are for your delectation another ... non-well.

When I finished I nipped down to Ruskin's ... or should it really be, Turner's, View above the Lune at Kirkby Lonsdale to see if I could find any evidence of Ladies Well, below St.Mary's Church which sits high up on a bluff above the river.

There is evidence that it was obviously somewhere much visited once upon a time with a railed pathway leading very steeply down a now extremely muddy and slippy bank down to the fast running Lune but at the bottom there isn't any sign except perhaps where (middle panel) water emerges from the banking and there's some evidence of structure. Pretty tenuous.

Anyway, what is lovely is Ruskin's account ...

“Well, the population of Kirkby cannot, it appears, in consequence of their recent civilization, any more walk, in summer afternoons, along the brow of this bank, without a fence. I at first fancied this was because they were usually unable to take care of themselves at that period of the day: but saw presently I must be mistaken in that conjecture, because the fence they have put up requires far more sober minds for safe dealing with it than ever the bank did; being of thin, strong, and finely sharpened skewers, on which if a drunken man rolled heavily, he would assuredly be impaled at the armpit. They have carried this lovely decoration down on both sides of the woodpath to the spring, with warning notice on ticket,—“This path leads only to the Ladies’ well—all trespassers will be prosecuted”—and the iron rails leave so narrow footing that I myself scarcely ventured to go down,—the morning being frosty, and the path slippery,—lest I should fall on the spikes. The well at the bottom was choked up and defaced, though ironed all round, so as to look like the “pound” of old days for strayed cattle: they had been felling the trees too; and the old wood had protested against the fence in its own way, with its last root and branch,—for the falling trunks had crashed through the iron grating in all directions, and left it in already rusty and unseemly rags, like the last refuse of a railroad accident, beaten down among the dead leaves.