'The Ebbing and Flowing Well'

or, Anne's Well

The Well Paradox
.... don't ask me ...
As usual, this well thing just goes on discombobulating. This one has been in my mind for ages. A relatively easy catch as I head home for work and I was waiting for it to get a bit lighter to do just that. I had a good mental map of it before I went and had checked the aerial view beforehand and stopped today on my way back from a day at Sedbergh.

What is it with these wells?! This one is nowhere near any obvious habitation and yet it is named. Who? Why? What? What's the bloomin' point of an ebbing and flowing well. You want your wells to be a bit more reliable than that. 

Like so many though, I wonder what was here in pre-recorded history. It's close to Shap, near various stone circles and the like. To my mind it just seems to be a spring that 'upwells' here. As I scouted around it is obviously a limestone outcrop and the area is pitted with deep sink hole craters but this was the only source of water and it was emerging from the rock and then goes on to become part of Force Beck. But there are other springs and wells in the area. They don't have names.

As if all this isn't mystery enough ... what adds to the wonderful well, water from the earth, mystery, is that, to my astonishment this unprepossessing spot on the edge of the main northern modern artery of the M6 actually has a geological fault named after it ... the Anne's Well Fault which marks the edge of the Shap Wells basin.

Added 25/1/2020 - I found the following image whilst researching Penrith wells... https://www.hpacde.org.uk/cumbria/jpgh/ct24187.jpg

As I mooched about on the moor just above the well, the drone of the M6 became strangely part of the Eliot-like timelessness of the place. I flushed a snipe, a curlew flew over and a small murmuration of starlings formed and unformed in the distance.

from T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets (Burnt Norton)

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.