Mysterious Ebbing and Flowing Well, Settle

I used to visit the Ebbing and Flowing Well at Giggleswick with my parents every time we drove past, which was frequently.  It's on the B6480 (or Clapham Road) under Buck Haw Brow (pronounced bucker brow) near Settle golf course. If you're inclined to visit, be aware the road is pretty busy and there's no pull-out for the well.

"Ebb" - to drain away. "Flow" -  a stream of water.

Humphrey Bolton / Ebbing and Flowing Well, Buck Haw Brow B6480, Giggleswick / CC BY-SA 2.0

Although it's reputed to have a grander and more folk-magic past, it is nowadays a little livestock drinking cistern by the side of the road. Regularly, it begins to fill up - mysteriously, since the flow isn't associated with rain - and then drain again, almost immediately.  The water height change is only a few inches, and you can easily spend half an hour staring at it wondering if the water is ebbing, flowing or just lying there prompting hallucinations.

If you read histories of the well, they mostly say, "the well these days has stopped ebbing and flowing".  This isn't actually true, it's just most people have the twitches from too much smart phone wrangling and don't watch for long enough.

Being old enough to have grown up without the phone twitches is good in one way, but not in others - for example, I don't have any of my own photos or videos, because cameras cost a fortune back then. So these two videos are cribbed.

The first has a description of the history and location of the well, with a time-lapse of the effect.



(From bill bartlett's YouTube)

Then there's this nice example from John Barrow's YouTube, who has disabled it so it doesn't play on Blogger. It's worth the extra click. It shows the well at a very active point - and the people speaking in the video have hit on how it works. It's a siphon, so once the water reaches a certain point down the (invisible) outlet, it will continue to 'mysteriously' empty, far below the point the where it started draining.

I'm not sure why I remembered this today, and went looking for videos. Perhaps it's just a nostalgic day - my other chase down the internet rabbit hole this morning was to follow the fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry, which is at least 500 years old and may even have been planted for medicinal purposes by the Romans. For years it was in the grounds of a hospital, but the hospital moved out and the developers moved in.