Approximate Location
OS Grid Reference: SJ 860 777
Latitude: 53.29.74N Longitude: 2.21.35W
The Wishing Well is not a location in Alan Garner‘s Weirdstone Trilogy yet it is intimately bound up with the author’s family history. In Where Shall We Run To? (2018, 122), The Voice That Thunders (1997, 77) and the documentary The Writer’s Workshop: Places and Things Garner notes that his great-great-grandfather, the stonemason, Robert Garner constructed the Wishing Well as a romantic landscape feature for Sir Humphrey de Trafford around the year 1840. This was part of a number of other works on the Edge, by Robert, including the Druid’s Circle and the Wizard’s Well.
Despite not being a canonical location in the books (although it is located very close to the Holywell entrance to Fundindelve), the Wishing Well is one of the most atmospheric places on the Edge. It’s a great place to sit and enjoy the babbling of the natural spring, the sound of birdsong and the dappled sunlight through the trees – as can be experienced vicariously through this video…