In Memory of Dorothy Hartley: Keeper of England’s Waters

“What a stream of interest we lost when we had water ‘laid on’, blended, ready mixed and chemically purified!”
— Dorothy Hartley (4 Oct.1893– 22nd Oct. 1985), author of Water in England

Dorothy Hartley spent her long life listening to the quiet voices of ordinary things: a farmhouse hearth, a barge on a slow canal, a loaf of bread, a bucket at a well. In Water in England she walked the length and depth of a watery country that most of us barely notice: holy springs and chalybeate spouts, sulphur wells and pump rooms, leather jugs and spa hotels, all part of a lived landscape in which water was never “just” something that came out of a tap. She understood that once we stop going to water, we easily forget how completely we live by water.

My own gathering of wells, spas and springs – from Harrogate to Llanwrtyd, from tidal “golden wells” in Pembrokeshire to overgrown chalybeate trickles in Welsh fields – owes everything to that insight. When I spoke with Melanie Wood at Harrogate Spa Water about how world water charities and spa producers might work together, we were really talking about the same thing Hartley cared about: the survival of clean water, whether it rises as a guarded spa or lies in a vast, municipal reservoir. Clean spa water is protected because it has a price tag; but the ocean, the aquifers, the ice caps, the lakes and streams, the boggy wells choked with weeds, the floodwater in our streets and the rain on our roofs are just as necessary, and far less respected.

If we had evolved to live always in rivers and the sea, would we have engineered our waste so that it never washed back into our own home? I suspect we would. As it is, we live mostly on land and dump on our neighbours – the creatures who breathe water, sift it, pass through it – because they cannot send the rubbish back. It is cheaper and more convenient to foul the common water than to take responsibility for our own muck. The invoice for that convenience is now arriving on our doorsteps as polluted rivers, exhausted aquifers, dead zones in the sea and floods laced with everything we were too lazy to deal with properly.

There is no time left for blaming parents, grandparents or great‑grandparents; they lived in another water-world. We are the first generations to know, beyond any doubt, how thoroughly we are poisoning the planetary well, and the last who can still prevent the worst of it. Whatever country we live in, whatever lives we lead, we depend on water being fit for our use – and not only for ours. Water must be fit for plants; we rely on their quiet labour for every breath. Most of the oxygen we draw in without a thought is made not in forests but by countless microscopic plants in the sea. Each time you breathe, you owe thanks to those tiny, green workers in the ocean, and their work is only possible in water that is not choked and poisoned.

So: do what you can, where you are, to keep muck production to a minimum. We all produce muck; that is not the problem. The problem is pretending that once it is out of sight it is out of the world. We can choose production methods that pollute less and we can treat what we do produce in well-managed, land‑based systems instead of letting it leak, drift and flush into the shared water on which all life depends.

Dead planets do not make “Home Sweet Homes”. No creed, no politics, no peacekeeping force can compensate for a poisoned river system or a lifeless sea. To fight for clean water is to fight for a livable today and tomorrow, for ourselves, our neighbours and all the other beings with whom we share this blue world.

Dorothy Hartley walked ahead of us, tracing the ivied walls of vanished pump rooms, noting the “almost vanished” and “totally vanished” wells, listening to country people who still remembered the taste and virtue of each spring. She knew that when a named well is lost, a piece of local memory dissolves with it: the rheumatism cured, the eyes washed, the children christened, the long walk with a bucket, the quiet gossip by the dipping place. This small act of remembrance – this list of chalybeate trickles, sulphur reekers, tidal wells and holy spouts – is offered in gratitude for her work, and as a pledge that we will not simply let the remaining waters slip, one by one, into neglect.

In memory of Dorothy Hartley, may we learn again to go to water with respect, to know it, to name it, and to keep it clean.