The Dripping Well: a kind of magic
Artist in Residence at Hamilton MAS, Felixstowe Heritage Seafront Gardens
Tuesday 9th June 2020
Felixstowe Seafront Gardens developed as a result of the popularity in the late Victorian period for visiting coastal locations in pursuit of improved health and relaxation. The natural springs occurring along the cliffs, together with the proximity to the beach, encouraged the gardens to be developed as a pleasure ground for people to use the spa waters. The gardens allowed visitors to promenade next to the sea, to enjoy the fresh air and to take the reputed health giving qualities of the Felixstowe Spa water.
Heritage Garden public information board
Today promised a gap in the weather and some dramatic shadows, so I aimed to spend some time experiencing and recording the Seafront gardens as they bloom with full spring colour and a host of hungry flying insects.
I have noticed how the benches have become a valuable punctuation for people as they move about in a socially distanced manner. Solitary people nestling into their claimed space with a book or a tethered dog eyeing up the sandwiches. Today I sense an easiness and relaxed understanding between the garden users. The water garden features pull the small children into their sparkling animations.
The Dripping Well continues to fascinate me. Built to harness the natural spa spring waters flowing from the steep terrace, the intimate feature reflects the structure of a classical grotto of sorts although access into the space is denied.
One of my favourite 1930’s Valentine’s postcards (salvaged from an antique emporium in Long Melford) features the Dripping Well and in the photograph there is a woman and a young girl staring, seemingly mesmerised into its watery mouth.
That is what moving water does in a garden- it draws one to it and captivates.
The mesmerising presence of gently running water offers a different sensory dimension for the visitor. Not withstanding the enduring lure for the imaginative child, there is a classical symbolic dimension connected to fertility- likening the entry of a grotto to entering the womb of Mother Earth. The imitation of nature’s caves found fashionable popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries, excellent examples found in Renaissance gardens including Boboli Gardens and Villa Castello in Florence that were built to evoke allegorical worlds. Grottoes take on different structural elements, earlier examples encrusted with decorative natural forms such as shells, quartz, pebbles and rocks. Later examples that mirror the Dripping well aim for naturalism, as though the visitor may have just stumbled upon a natural phenomenon.
In 2017 I made a long anticipated visit to Alexander Pope’s famed grotto (1740) in Twickenham. Pope conceived his as a fascinating example of the grotto as a form of Wunderkammer. The network of interior walls are decorated with an array of geological samples and fragments of mirror, that once illuminated by flickering candle-light must have transformed into a sparkling kaleidoscopic space in which he could think and write.
During my visit, a guide described how this spectacle must have been like an 18th century version of a disco glitter ball.
The equivalent to the glitter ball here in the Spa gardens must be the round pond, grottoes and water cascades, tirelessly projecting the dancing summer light. For a moment stopping me in my tracks, they seem to hold time fast and invite me to enjoy that moment under the heat of the June sun.
The opening quote in Gunter Vogt’s fascinating book, Landscape as a cabinet of curiosities resonates with this train of thought as he describes the healing promises of clean air and spring water in the Swiss mountains;
An ice-cold sunny December day. Late morning. At a table in the Panorama Restaurant Schatzalp with a panoramic view of the landscape around Davos. Behind is the legendary Art Nouveau hotel, dating from a time when the air and landscape in Davos still promised healing powers and when a kind of magic spell still lay over this mountain.
He talks about the mountains of this Swiss region as a resource for the people who live and visit there. That we can enjoy a landscape if we have knowledge about it rather than just a visible awareness of it, how walking through the landscape is very different to ‘just sitting on a terrace and enjoying the view’.
In these challenging times, post Lockdown, surely it is time to reconnect with our ‘healing gardens’ and embrace nature, allow our connection to grow and blur the edges between the safety of our man made and more naturally occurring boundaries and let the ‘magic’ back in.
All photos Jane Frederick
