Dowsing the mound on Chosen Hill

I keep coming back to the little known and much underrated Chosen Hill (shown on maps as Churchdown Hill) between Gloucester and Cheltenham. It's one of my special places in my local area. And every time I come here I feel the same thing. An urge to do some dowsing!

The reason I've not done so before is that I didn't really know where to start. I don't have the time or resources to do a detailed survey, but there didn't seem much point in doing a half-hearted effort either. Besides which, Chosen Hill is a very popular place for dogwalkers and ramblers, and whenever anybody sees me swinging around a bent coathanger they invariably come and ask "whatcha doin'?" which is almost impossible to explain without sounding like a nutter.

But this week I went up there and gave it a go. I would love to hear from any other dowsers who have done any work up here, and whether they get results which are similar to or different from mine.

The church on top of its green mound.

That's some location for an old church.

First of all I should explain why this site is special, though the photos probably say all that needs to be said. The hill itself is an outlier to the Cotswolds and sits on its own – a 500ft high steep-sided lump sat in the middle of the Severn Vale. Perched on the north-eastern corner of the hilltop (which is not, incidentally, the highest point of the hill but it's pretty close) is the isolated medieval church of St Bartholomew, which was originally the parish church for the village of Churchdown, and a punishing trek up a steep slope for former parishioners. There is a newer church in the village now, but St Bartholomew's is still used for a handful of services and it's a remarkable place, full of historic curiosities, re-used carved stones from an earlier church, and images of dragons. It's also quite a landmark, visible from all around the local area, looking like a faery castle when the sun catches it in early evening.

The church is built on top of a steep-sided mound in the churchyard, which is a very striking feature, and suggests the place was sacred before the church (and its Saxon predecessor) was built. The mound has curious ridges or terraces around it, in a style which reminds me of Glastonbury Tor, albeit on a smaller scale. Some of these are visible in the churchyard, while others can be seen continuing some distance down the northern and eastern side of the hill, interrupted by field boundaries and clumps of trees but still visible if you make the effort to look. These lower ridges are on private property so it isn't possible to explore them close up, but they have intrigued me for a long time.

There is uncertainty as to whether the topographical features of the hill are natural or man-made, or both. Older maps show the whole hilltop as an Iron-Age camp; modern maps don't. I think it probably is an ancient camp because it has that sort of vibe and there have been finds of pottery fragments from that time period. Unfortunately the majority of the original enclosure has been destroyed by the construction of a set of covered reservoirs in the 20th century, but there are still some surviving earthen banks around the hilltop which look very much like ramparts.

It's the small green mound immediately underneath the church, however, which draws my attention the most.

Ridged pathways around the mound in the north-western corner of the churchyard, with a pedestrian gate at the bottom leading down towards the village.

The western end of the mound.

The southern side with old box tombs set into the slope of the mound.

The entrance on the northern side. I got a water reaction with my dowsing rods in the gateway instead of the usual 'entrance' response.

One of the things that intrigues me about the mound is that it has a direction of spin. I don't much like using the New Agey term 'earth energy', but I don't have another name for it and can't really explain what it is either, so I can only say that there is some kind of telluric flow which goes around the mound in either a clockwise or anticlockwise direction on different occasions. I feel this so strongly that I don't need dowsing rods to pick it up. Every time I visit the churchyard I immediately feel which direction the energy is spinning and feel obligated to walk around the churchyard in the direction of flow. It seems to switch over on some periodic cycle but I don't go up there often enough to know how often it changes. I can only say that it was flowing in a clockwise direction during my dowsing trip on the afternoon of 1st December, but on my previous visit two weeks earlier, on 17th November, it was going anticlockwise.

So even if I couldn't do a proper survey, I wanted to dowse the area of the churchyard and get a sense of what is there, hopefully to follow up any interesting discoveries later. My dowsing tool of choice is a V-rod, which is a metal or plastic version of the traditional forked stick divining rod. I also used angle rods to check my results afterwards and for those tasks which the V-rod doesn't excel at, such as directional pointers. To record the places where the rods reacted I used a handheld GPS to mark them as waypoints. This isn't perfect: the limitation of the technology is that it's only accurate to within a few feet, but for a job like this it's a lot better than faffing about with maps and measuring tapes. It was very cold and frosty on the hilltop on 1st December (most of the photos you see here were taken during previous visits when the weather was nicer) so I was hoping there wouldn't be too many people up there. A bit of a vain hope, and I got interrupted a few times. But over the space of about two hours I collected 70 dowsing response points, which were a mixture of water (negative) and earth energy (positive) reactions. When I say positive and negative, I only mean that the V-rod dips downward over water and upward for any kind of telluric stuff. I also get an upward response for boundaries and entrances, which are distinguishable from the telluric reactions only in that they feel subtly different. More static I guess, rather than flowing.

I got one of these 'boundary' responses while walking up the path towards the church, in an open area with no sign of any boundary. But when I looked around I could see a few clues, such as a change in direction in a nearby wall, suggesting that this was once a perimeter and that the line I was picking up was the original boundary of the churchyard before it got extended. When I got home I dug out some old OS maps and found exactly that – in 1924 and earlier, the churchyard boundary was on that very line. This is one of the things that draws me to dowsing, its uncanny ability to pick up the 'ghost' of things which aren't there any more. Not the ghosts of people (though it can do that as well), but of walls, doorways, paths and hedges.

A tomb with a view.

Water lines in the churchyard
The first thing I did was search for water lines – a bit of old-fashioned water divining. Water is the easiest thing to dowse for, and gives nice decisive responses. I found two parallel water lines crossing the path just inside the churchyard but had the feeling they were modern pipes. Then when I got to the mound itself I started picking up lots of underground water. The first one was a few feet in front of the church door and when I looked down I saw there was a cluster of small iron stop-tap hatches set into the ground. Well that explains that then! But actually it's really nice when you get that corroboration, that there really is underground water in the place where the rod decided to dip. It makes you feel like a bit less of a loony prancing about with a metal stick.

Oh well, that explains the water response here then.

But I soon found more. In fact the stuff seemed to be everywhere. Some of it with very strong reactions, where the rod felt like it was tugging itself out of my hands. And then I realised the little hatches were everywhere too. Some stop-taps, some monitoring hatches, dotted around in odd clusters all around the church foundations on every side. Elsewhere in the churchyard I spotted two much larger inspection hatches which gave me minimal reactions ... one caused the rod a slight twitch, the other nothing. But most of the small hatches on top of the mound were close to points where I got a really strong water reaction. Surely an old church doesn't need this much plumbing? I can only assume that there are a load of springs on the mound, and that they are being actively managed to prevent soggy soil from undermining the church building. It's so precariously perched it's easy to imagine it sliding off down the hill towards Badgeworth after a heavy rainstorm.

As well as the drainage arrangements, I found water lines in a few more interesting places. There was a water line coming out from under the church at each of its four corners (at chancel and tower). This is quite a common thing that most dowsers find at old churches, though don't ask me the reason for it. But in this case, the water line in the north-west corner on the tower was very slightly off alignment. The other three were bang on. I don't know why that one corner should be off, but the tower was rebuilt in 1601 so it's not inconceivable that the water line may be aligned with the original tower; who knows.

It would've been interesting to dowse for water lines inside the church to see where the corner lines go and see if I could find the 'blind spring' which is almost always to be found somewhere near the altar of such an old church. But the church was locked as usual, so I had to limit myself to the outside.

The eastern side of the churchyard has a retaining wall which cuts off the slope of the mound. You can still just see two sculpted ridges in the mound on the right hand side of the photo. The wooden fence follows the line of another, wider ridge lower down. 

Telluric lines
This is where things get a bit more nebulous. The term 'earth energy' is often bandied about without defining what it actually means, and I admit I don't know either. In 30 years of doing this I'm no closer to understanding what it is I'm picking up and I only know that I'm picking up something. Whatever it may be, there are consistencies and patterns in where it appears and how it behaves, and that's good enough for me to want to dowse for it. It dowses positive (i.e. it flips the V-rod upward) but is sometimes more difficult to pin down than water, and more liable to change. It usually has a clear direction of flow but feels like it has less of a defined spatial position ... unlike water it may or may not be underground.

So having got that caveat out of the way, here's what I found. The energy goes around the mound in concentric rings. (It's possible it could be a spiral, but I think it's concentric rings.) These are elliptical and follow the shape of the mound. Nearer the top of the mound the rings are fairly narrow and close together, but as you descend the hill they get progressively broader and and more widely spaced. Dowsing the south side I counted nine rings in total, from the old churchyard boundary up to the church door. They might continue inside for all I know, but I didn't have access. Nor did I have access to the northern or southern sides of the mound, which are on private property. But I did dowse the terraced ridges inside the churchyard and found the energy rings corresponded to them closely, with some additional rings in between them as well.

I also picked up a broad energy line passing through the west wall of the tower, almost dead centre. A corresponding line comes out of (or into) the east wall, but this one seemed to be off centre. As I didn't go in the church, I can't be sure whether it's all the same line, and whether it's straight or not. I picked up another broad line going south-north through the church, but ran out of time to plot any details of it.

The elliptical shape of the hill on the north-eastern side, looking from the churchyard towards the Cotswold hills. You can't see the ridges and terraces very well in this photo, but they are there! The village of Churchdown can be seen on the left, down in the valley, with Cheltenham in the middle distance.

There were a couple of buttresses which seemed to have become active nodes for energy lines. One was on the north side at the edge of the tower. The other was on the south side (almost opposite in fact) on the outside of the south transept. This is not the oldest part of the church by any means, but it seems it's been there long enough to accumulate some telluric welly.

The buttress just to the left of the drainpipe has quite a zap to it. As does the one just visible to the right of the tower.

Anomalies

A small area just to the west of the north porch gave me a very odd reaction with the V-rod, as if something was pulling or jerking the tip of the rod to the right (towards the church). The same spot when dowsed with angle rods was not quite as strong, but the rods did ‘range’ and swing about.

Another oddity was that I got a decisive water response in the pedestrian gateway at the north-west end of the churchyard. I usually get a positive ‘entrance’ or ‘boundary’ response over a gate but the water response was far stronger. I tried dowsing over the hedge to the side of the gate and got the expected boundary responses.

The north porch is unusual in that it has two storeys – the upper floor being a priest's room which once would have served as basic living quarters.

This photo was taken on the public footpath down towards the village, on the north side of the church. My dowsing rod picked this up as an old track-line, running around the base of the mound and crossing the current footpath at right angles.

The Chosen Hill church scratchings

At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, a pencilled notice was visible above the south door of St Bartholomew's church on Churchdown Hill. Very possibly it still is, obliterated by layers of scribbles, scratchings and daubings. The notice read: "Non scribe Ecclesiae Muris Quia Deus Dominus Tuus In Ecclesia Habitat". Which translates as "Write not on the walls of the church for the Lord thy God abides within". Given the continued rampant defacement, perhaps something more on the lines of "Don't write on the fucking walls" might have got the message across.

  The south doorway, where pencilled signatures of the early 20th century make an odd accompaniment to carved Norman studded chevrons.

I have to confess though that I love church graffiti. Not that I condone the daubing and etching of sacred buildings, but the historical graffiti is fascinating and it's one of the most direct and personal relics our ancestors have left us. It often shows considerable patience and stone-working skill, and beautifully proportioned letterforms – largely lost skills, which show up the casual wall scratchers of today as rank amateurs with no sense of beauty or proportion.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best historic graffiti is found in places where people could scrape unobserved. Isolated churches, where bored people had to hang out for long periods, are a rich source of them, especially when they're not overlooked by any roads or buildings. Perched as it is on the top of a sacred mound at the corner of an iron-age hillfort, high above the surrounding countryside and quite a steep trek even from its adjacent village, St Bartholomew's on Churchdown Hill (or Chosen Hill as it's called locally) has acquired quite a collection of graphical scrapings from every age of its history. They adorn more or less every part of the church, inside and out.

When it comes to unobserved spots, St Bartholomew's church is pretty impressive in its isolation, perched on top of the ancient ramparts of Chosen Hill.

For sheer flagrant cheek, it's hard to beat the contribution of Thomas Badger, who carved his name in crude capitals deep into the stone of the chancel arch, in a way that cannot fail to have led an incensed vicar straight to the culprit – unless perhaps this part of the wall was covered up by furnishings in his day. His vandalism is currently exposed for all to see.

One of the things that intrigues me most though is a symbol which appears over and over again all over this church, but particularly on the north side, and which I will name the Churchdown Sigil. It comprises a lozenge with an arrow through it – invariably pointing upwards, although it has a few variations such as multiple arrows or multiple lozenges. The best example can be found in the north porch, just to the left of the door, where it appears alongside another intriguing pattern based around a quartered cross.

The Churchdown Sigil (right) and the quartered cross

The guidebooks describe it as a mason's mark, and that certainly seems very reasonable. I've seen masons' marks on other churches which look very like it. But masons are skilled stoneworkers and most of the examples of this symbol are a bit amateurish, as if they were carved by somebody who didn't have the right tools or skills. There's also the sheer number of them – sometimes several times on the same block of stone. An obsessive amateur copier of mason's marks? Or something else? If anybody has seen this symbol on any other churches I'd be interested to know.

Alongside this figure of a bird and someone's initials are more examples of the Churchdown Sigil. A small one and the point of a much larger one, plus an incomplete one (far right).

The north porch (pictured at the top of this post) has some of the best of Churchdown's amateur chisellings as well as the highest concentration of sigils. The porch is an unusual two-storey job with a priest's lodging above it, which was added to the church in the 13th century. Some of the graffiti is probably not far off being contemporary with it, and in fact it's possible that some of the carvings pre-date the porch on stones re-used from elsewhere. A good example of this can be seen on the outer walls of the porch where the base and lid of two Crusader coffins, complete with incised cross, have been used as building blocks. (I have a Joe Orton-style mental image of the masons turfing some poor benighted skeleton out of its coffin so they can nab the decorative lid.)

Here's a rather nice fleuron, bunged in for no apparent reason as if someone was practising and got bored half way through the second one.

Much of the graffiti in the porch is highly enigmatic, and the more you stare at it, the more you see different ways of viewing or interpreting it, especially as it's often hard to distinguish the lines of a carved image from natural marks or chips and scrapes in the stone. I think it's always important to look at these things with an open mind and be prepared to come up with your own thoughts about them, rather than taking anyone's view as established fact – even when it's in a respectable guidebook.

Perhaps one of the most curious to interpret is the figure, now extremely faded, on the door jamb of the porch's outer door. William T. Swift's book Some Account of the History of Churchdown, a valuable local history resource published in 1905, includes a description which Swift most likely got from the Rev. Dr. F. Smithe, who was vicar at the time he was researching the book, and who took a tremendous interest in the church's history. In their view it represents "a gaunt figure, or emblem, of Death – having the long hair and breasts of a woman; the fleshless arms are extended; in one hand an hour-glass is held, to denote the brief span of man's life, and in the other hand, to signify the grave, is an aspergès, which was used when the sprinkling of Holy Water upon the corpse (at the grave-side) was enjoined in the rubrics of the Old Uses or Service Books, such as that of Sarum."

Far be it from me to question the judgement of Dr Smithe or W.T. Swift, but to me it looks patently obvious that this is a mermaid. As faded as she is, she clearly has a scaly fish's tail, and underneath her is a symbol which looks very much like an anchor. Whether that could be an hourglass in her hand I couldn't say, but the other thing, an aspergès?! I'm not sure where these gentlemen are coming from in their "female Death" interpretation, but I think they might have got a bit tangled in a Biblical mindset. Last time I saw a priest asperging, he was using what appeared to be a pastry brush.

Given that she seems to be a mermaid, it may be fair to assume that the objects she's holding are a comb and mirror, since the majority of English pre-Reformation mermaids are depicted with them –  though admittedly the comb looks more like a television aerial. 

Another very striking image is what appears to be a face of Christ, with radiating aureole, chiselled into a lump of blue lias. Swift/Smithe reckon this to be pre-Reformation, and may well be right. And yes, all around this Christ-head you can see crude but distinctive Churchdown Sigils, some with multiple arrows.

Not all of St Bartholomew's wall chisellings are illicit; this official one (below) is rather nice too. The original Norman tower of the church fell into a dilapidated condition and was rebuilt in 1601. The rebuilding is commemorated by an engraved stone tablet at the back of the nave, incised with big bold letters and prahper Glahhsterrsh're spelling.

"This Belhows was buyldede in the yeere of our Lode God 1601". Plus additions.

The outside of the church has loads of carved grafitti – some of it quite brazen, other examples more subtle so that you spot different things every time you look. The oldest dated piece of graffiti I've found so far on the outside walls was apparently done in 1624.

Names and initials on the west wall of the tower dating back to 1624, not long after the tower was built. The Badger family have been at it again.

The church guidebook (an exceptionally good one, by the way) mentions a scratch dial on the outside north wall of the chancel, but this is very faded indeed and you need sharp eyes to spot it – all that's really visible is the hole for its long-lost gnomon. Another little enigma of this extraordinary church is why anybody would carve a scratch dial on the north wall, where it would have been as much use as a chocolate teapot. Most likely it was originally on the south wall and the stone block got moved during a past rebuilding: there are numerous re-used carved stones all over the fabric of this church, which point to the likelihood of an earlier building on the site whose stone was recycled. The fact that it's so weathered backs up the idea that it could be very old. Either that or it was etched by somebody with no sense of direction and a very poor grasp of physics.

 The northerly scratch dial. (NB This photo has been tarted up in Photoshop to enhance the outlines, otherwise, honestly, you wouldn't be able to see a damned thing.)

I feel like I've barely started extolling all the delights of St Bartholomew's Church so there will definitely be more to come. It always seems to be omitted from any books about interesting historic churches, but it seems to me to be a very special place and much underrated. Not to mention its position on a pre-Christian sacred hill where the powers still flow, and its magnificent views over the Severn Valley.

Sources:
Swift, William T., Some Account of the History of Churchdown (1905).
Waters, Gwen, A History and Guide to the Churches of St Bartholomew and St Andrew, Churchdown (church pamphlet, 1989, 2004).

Well in the Wildwood: the Mussel Well, Churchdown

Churchdown Hill, locally called Chosen Hill, solitary bump in the vale, marshy under the weight of its springs. Only one spring is named. In fact it has three names. The Ordnance Survey map tantalisingly marks the Mussel Well in the woods on the NW slope on or near the ramparts of an Iron Age camp, but without making entirely clear exactly where it is. Older maps show it as the Muzzel Well, with similar lack of precision. Other local sources refer to it, rightly or wrongly, as the Roman Well.

Never mind the maps; how difficult can it be to find a well?

Er ... moderately, in my experience. One of the problems is that you don't know what you're looking for, unless you've seen a picture of it previously. A "well" might turn out to be anything from an elaborate system of stone-built channels and chambers to a simple puddle on the ground. If the Ordnance Survey marks it as a "well" rather than a "spring" then that usually means there's some kind of visible man-made structure in place. Usually, but not always.

Well hidden: the slopes of Churchdown Hill are smothered with ancient woodland.

The first time I tried to discover the Mussel Well I didn't find it. Pitching into the faery-haunted woods below St Bartholomew's church, the magical church-on-a-tump which reminds me a little bit of Glastonbury Tor (only a bit flatter), I soon found myself hopelessly disorientated among the shady tangle of oak, ash and thorn. I squidged my way along endless stretches of boot sucking quagmire – abundant springs just under the surface ensure the paths remain perpetually muddy for most of the year – but realised I didn't have a clue where to look. I tried following my intuition, which led me towards a slight clearing in the trees on a steep slope (the whole hilltop is an Iron Age hillfort), but I was inadequately shod to make my way across an expanse of perilously sloping slop, studded with dog turds, to get to it, and so I reluctantly gave up. Not that I'm a cissy about falling on my arse in the mud, but I prefer not to do it with an expensive camera dangling round my neck. My frustration was increased when I got home and referred back to the maps because I realised that I'd been going the right way and must only have been a matter of yards away from finding it.

So I went back another day with a renewed resolve and a robust pair of boots. This time I got through the mud obstacles with ease, sending iridescent flies spinning from chunks of canine crap in the sunlight, but still no well. I trekked down the path one way, then trekked back up it the other way, all to no avail, and thought I was going to have to give up again. And then a distinctly smug voice in my head said "it's not so hard to find, you know." Meaning that oh yes it is hard to find, but my inner senses could lead me to it if only I'd let them. A moment later I noticed a narrow, informal path running up the rampart slope between the trees, and up it I went. Still no sign of a well, but half way up the earthworks my eye was drawn to a very imposing tree. An old hollow ash with whirls of ivy draped over it and a tall, triangular opening at the base.

Now, holey trees like this are a magnetic draw to my pagan soul, so I went over to get a closer look at it. There was something so powerful about its aura though that I was afraid to go too close; this was a tree Not-To-Be-Messed-With. I've rarely seen ash trees as big and old as this, and it appeared to be part of a row of mature ashes standing in a line; even within the wood with other trees all around, they stood out as venerable sentinels. And when I looked at the next one along, another tangle of ancient boughs, I saw that snuggled under its roots was a stone trough. Aha!

The Mussel Well – and I assume this is the Mussel Well, although there's no sign to say so – is an unprepossessing rectangular trough of indeterminate age, repaired or rebuilt multiple times by the look of it, obscured by dirt and moss and encroached by brambles. The water emerges from a metal pipe in a concrete block embedded into the hillside and falls into the trough, which is only a few inches deep and partially filled with well-rotted crud. The water then flows out through a second pipe at the front end. But maybe flows isn't the right word, because it's really somewhere between a trickle and a drip. So slight, in fact, that there's no drainage as such. The water drips into what appears to be a fairly primitive soakaway and barely even wets the ground. Intriguingly though, the ground below the well has a gulley cut through it as if there were formerly a stream running down the slope, although it's now dry and filled with brambles. There are also a few bits of stone lying about, half buried, which may have been part of it at some point.

Because of the slowness of the flow, the water in the trough is stagnant. I have a little self-anointing ritual I normally do when I encounter a well or spring, but the deep green depths of this pool revealed unappetising corpses of flies and worms and a host of unsavoury insect larva thingies wiggling about in it under a filmy sheen of gluck on the surface, and I really didn't feel inclined to dip my fingers in it. So I compromised by dipping my fingers in the drip of water coming out of the pipe, which was of course just as dirty and disgusting as the trough, but didn't look as horrible.

I'm not painting a very romantic view of this site am I? I have to say though, despite the state of the physical attributes, this felt like a spot with a bit of sacred whoomph behind it. Much of this was coming from the great gnarled and twisted ivy-mantled ash tree which stands guard beside it, a tree with a very active faery presence which takes its guardianship role very seriously, thank you very much. It's no good telling the tree spirit that the well is dirty and polluted; it presides over an older and deeper presence which goes beyond physical conditions.

The guardian of the well

Aside from the ambiance of the place, what can I tell you about the well? Available information is negligible. Most guides to Churchdown Hill make mention of the Mussel Well (frequently misspelt "Mussell") but none seem to offer any enlightenment. The local authority tourist information singles it out as one of the significant historical sites on the hill, and then says simply: "its history is obscure." Right, OK then. There doesn't seem to be any clue as to why it's called the Mussel Well, which I assume doesn't have anything to do with molluscs because the name appears to have evolved from an earlier form spelled "Muzzel". And there aren't any molluscs around here anyway, except fossilised ones. Perhaps the answer lies in an obscure land deed or reference library somewhere.

The Woodland Trust, who own and manage the woods, don't have a lot of historical information either, but they do mention in their leaflet that the Mussel Well provides a water supply to nearby Green Farm via a hidden pipe. If that's the case, then it explains why the current flow of the well is so depleted, and why it has the appearance of having been more gushing in the past. It's hard to guess at the age of the trough, as it looks to have been patched up several times; it has some white ceramic-lined bricks which look to be about a century old, and the lower stonework appears older. The alternative name, the Roman Well, implies that the site, if not the trough, dates back to Roman times – but such names can be misleading. There's no doubt that Churchdown Hill was a site of interest and activity for the Romans, and there's a set of steps credited to them on a nearby slope. But the bank in which the well is set is part of the Iron Age earthwork, long predating the Roman occupation. The well must surely have been known by the Dobunni people who lived here in pre-Christian times, although whether it was simply a water supply or had a religious significance I don't know (though I know what my intuition tells me).

One of the only references I've found in any of my books is in Stephen Yeates' A Dreaming for the Witches (which, interestingly enough, has an aerial photo of Churchdown Hill on the cover). He cites an earlier history of Churchdown by W.T. Swift, published 1905, which reports sightings of a faery funeral procession coming through the entrance of the Iron Age ramparts and disappearing into the hillside at an ash tree by the Mussel Well. There are of course many folk traditions about faeries seen or encountered at a well in the woods: the Mabinogion, the legend of the Faery Melusine, the folk song Tam Lin, and many medieval literary sources. As bonkers as these things may seem to modern readers, I have to say that having felt the aura of awe around that opening in the ash tree, not to mention the intensely solicitous green guardian of the ash tree beside the well, the idea of this place being a long established portal into faery doesn't seem very surprising to me!