As a child, drinking deep from the books and tracts available to me, I discovered a small pre-war guide to Christchurch which had the following passage:

By the roadside here and sadly neglected, is the one-time famous Tutton’s Well, which has a constant supply of pure water fed by underground springs, whose source is far inland under the high hills of the Forest.
Its wonderful purity and mineral qualities were well known to the monks of Christchurch Twyneham; throughout medieval times it was known all over the countryside as a specific for diseases of the eye, and water from this well for medicinal purposes was conveyed to towns far inland. It is something of the past almost forgotten now, but as late as 1832 a traveller wrote: It is endowed with many medicinal virtues; and held in estimation and veneration by the old inhabitants equal to that entertained by the Cambro Britons for the holy well of St Winifred’s.

Sadly the very rare guide was lent to a local publican (for a friend interested in the town) and was not recoverable after a while. However a copy exists in the special collections of Christchurch Public Library, a public resource that should never be permitted to fail us when private sources dry up or become corrupted.
I would have read of this trace of the well when Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies was a distant memory, but still a potent trace in my mind, if only for the artist Jessie Wilcox Smith who was responsible for another famous painting Little Drops of Water which graced the front page of my Mudeford Sandbank News by happy coincidence last year. [see www.msbnews.co.uk for the archived copy]
Jessie seems to have been displaced from the pool of our wider public memory today by new flavours and tastes but the internet preserves her talent and a kind of homeopathic process seems still at work through earlier concentrations of her art still percolating in our minds.
Nevertheless, although the magic of finding water (which when emptied by bucket from a source in the ground perpetually fills again) was to be denied me until middle age the magic from art and literature was still there, somewhere. And, it is still available to us/our children if you knew where to look.
A brief journey back to the reservoir of our memory, the bridge over time, that is a library; finds the following from The Water Babies:

At last, at the bottom of a hill, they came to a spring, not such a spring as you see here, which soaks up out of white gravel in the bog, among red fly-catchers, and pink bottle-heath, and sweet white orchids; nor such a one as you may see, too, here, which bubbles up under the warm sand-bank in the hollow lane, by the great tuft of ladyferns, and makes the sand dance reels at the bottom, day and night, all the year round; not such a spring as either of those; but a real North-country limestone fountain, like one of those in Sicily or Greece, where the old heathen fancied the nymphs sat cooling themselves the hot summer’s day, while the shepherds peeped at them from behind the bushes. Out of a low cave of rock, at the foot of a limestone crag, the great fountain rose, quelling and bubbling and gurgling, so clear that you could not tell where the water ended and the air began; and ran away under the road, a stream large enough to turn a mill among blue geranium, and golden globe-flower, and wild raspberry, and the bird-cherry with its tassels of snow.

Elsewhere in the local guide was a photograph of a neglected pump overgrown and unused just asking for a small boy to re-discover it in the 1960’s. But, World War Two had demanded tribute from scavengeable ironwork and the old village green was bare. The old pump was gone, the water was not to be seen and the water discharging into the harbour people said came from elsewhere. A concrete circle in the centre of the plot was dismissed as being in the wrong place!
About this time as a bespectacled and blazered youth I was introduced to the world of the sensate, if only through literature. I remember and have re-discovered this from Cider with Rosie:

I discovered water a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub.
You could pump it in pure gulps out of the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air.
You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground. Substance of magic which you could tear or wear, confine or scatter, or send down holes, but never burn or break or destroy.
Laurie Lee

Drinking cider and discovering the unfolding contours of the flower of holiday-time encounters was denied me, at least for a time, as a Southampton-based schoolboy. But the old-as-time sensation of water, fresh or salt, was already in my young memory from Mudeford Sandbank beach hut and harbour and sea boating and fishing experiences.
The magic of holiday romances a la Cider with Rosie were of course to come later and the memory of such stolen moments might still escape the confines imposed in small spaces behind huts, in the backs of land-rovers and under upturned boats. Memories that even now can re-surface and which, like water, can neither be broken, burnt or destroyed.
Even if all that was denied me then, the elemental force of water will not be denied for long, even if a King might be referred to as weak as water. Surely this quip is an insult to water.
Old citizens in the town rose up when sentiment for the site of Tutton’s Well and the remembered public good was threatened with a new private aspiration for an enlarged guide hut intended to be built over what was recorded as the plot of a once revered resource.
The Girl Guide Hut, an ageing asbestos structure, needed renewal of its own, and old controversies over its proximity to the old water structures (there had been several) were resurrected. A tiny concentration of historians and civic minded people tried to raise the subject of the old structures and even sought to influence the Guides to build elsewhere.
Your editor, remembering the pursuit of his youth, wrote the following when the subject broke through once again into the local press in 1996:

Parish Pump Politics
Sir,
Is there an unseen hand at work shaping the fate of Tutton’s Well at the edge of Christchurch harbour? It has been something of a pantomime in recent months trying to divine not just where the well is, but whether its preservation can be achieved in the face of competing interests.
Now a new pressure group (The Tutton’s Well Preservation Society) has had some success preventing the well being buried permanently under a replacement and enlarged Girl Guide Hut at Stanpit. The Guides, it is admitted on all sides, have been shabbily treated in so far as they are not yet guaranteed another suitable site.
Christopher Chope the (then) prospective parliamentary candidate has intervened on their behalf, no doubt counting thereby on the votes of perhaps 200 parents. The local residents’ association decided after some delay to do the same but wondered if there was some long term, as yet unknown to them reason for the surprising number of objections.
There are several obvious ones. The view, the site being on a public open space, the proposed millennium footpath around the harbour, the restoration of an old public landing place, the dispute over Fisherman’s Bank, the fact that in 1958 the hut was only a temporary solution, traffic problems, the delay needed to sort out the other possible options and finally sentiment for the well itself, all spring to mind.
We do know that until the water became mysteriously contaminated the water was crystal clear and had been for centuries. Were useen forces at work, then, to pollute the well and therefore deny public access to it? Desk research suggests this may have simp0ly been a periodic flushing of the well at exceptional high tides.
From pre-Christian times wells have been extremely rich in symbolic and allegorical resonances, never mind the practical necessity for water. As such, water represents life, love, refreshment, generation, fertility, preservation, resurrection, order and harmony; whereas the lack of water represents denial, sterility, corruption, disorder and death. It is an old battle.
A Catholic Christchurch Priory who owned the well until 1539, had a resident Templar knight, Stephen de Staplebrigg, who would have drunk from Tutton’s Well and probably would have fought for its continuance if, in the 14th century it had been threatened. His order knew the value of water and the penalty for losing its source, both practically and allegorically. Before him, Vespasian, with or without his elephants, would have needed and indeed allegedly did use Tutton’s Well on his journeys. After him came Oliver Cromwell’s horses who watered at this old well, or so it seems.
We only know so much, for water is like our memory, it must be recycled and shared or it will be lost.
A Water Diviner

The reverential aspects associated with water are no fey imaginings, the most detailed and rigorous historical study of holy wells yet published is by museum curator James Rattue called The Living Stream: holy wells in historical context (1995).
Often less academically qualified, but tapping into a much older and pre-Christian tradition are the Dorset Earth Mysteries Group and the Bournemouth Dowsers, (both of whom run local groups, often entwined, and both to be found on the internet) where theories, experiments, practices and beliefs (often somewhat outside prevailing conventional scientific establishment views) may flourish.
What complicated the flow of ideas and recovered memories about the Tutton’s Well story was the fact that the site had had two water features, the well which at times had had a pump upon it in the centre of the green, and a dipping place lost about three-quarters of a century ago.
The Guide hut had been reported half a century ago as threatening the dipping place, sometimes presumed to be the well, an encroachment presumed to be made worse by the building’s replacement extending even further towards the harbour.
Also lost to history over the last half-century was a stone quay and public landing place which campaigners wished to restore if only through a sense of history or heritage.
The well campaigners probed, researched and excavated, publicising the sorry fate of the water features and the Guides were prepared to move to another site better suited as far as parking was concerned.
Former Councillor Reg Stones, a well campaigner who in committee often cut the Gordian knot had a proposal that the guide hut be simply moved to the other side of the plot; which although at the time had a Solomonic quality about it has proved to have been unnecessary.
Sadly, despite many efforts and frustrations the best prospect for the Guides became to stay put and happily as it turns out the old central well has proved the better prospect for restoration.
A stockbroker with the same surname as the well came forward and offered to fund some sort of restoration, albeit likely now to be a waterless one, as digging at the dipping place, the supposed spot from maps and memory, was frustrated by both the new building and a supposed resulting absence of the renowned water. What archaeological finds, brick structure and groundwater that was there was inconclusive.
History can conceal and mislead, never mind reveal what you want to find. We may have been victims of, and thus for a while, fresh perpetrators, of memories just wide of the mark, and moreover, relied on others statements that had been duly recorded in print.
However, when constructing what was to be a tribute to the central well/pump structure, the opportunity was taken to probe the spot which discovered a rubble filled shaft five foot deep in which, when emptied of the rubble, the (at first) murky water was so persistent in faithfully renewing itself, it could not be completely emptied by two pumps pumping at the combined rate of 5,000 gallons an hour. The campaigners had struck liquid sky.
It now appears that the well was the main source and probably fed by a high overflow still in evidence (but just beneath the then surface) the contested site of the dipping place situated by the wall close to the guide hut.
The restoration was announced in the local New Milton Advertiser thus:

Historic Tutton’s Well reopened
Tutton’s Well at Stanpit, one of Christchurch’s oldest landmarks, was reopened on Saturday after a long campaign by conservationists.
The Friends of Tutton’s Well group was set up in the 1990’s when it was feared that the rebuilding of the nearby Guide’s hut would destroy the well which had been used as a source of pure water since the bronze age. However further archaeological investigations near the hut and in the centre of the plot suggested that the greatest flow of water was from the latter, with over 5,000 gallons an hour, so it was decided to reconstruct it there. Stockbroker Tom Tutton, who despite his name has no known family links to Christchurch, funded the creation of the stone features, with the rest of the work being carried out by volunteers.
The re-opening ceremony was performed by Mr Tutton and the Mayor of Christchurch, Coun. Sue Spittle, with around 50 supporters attending. Master of ceremonies was Coun. Kevin Dingley, the chairman of the Friends, and refreshments were provided by the Avonmouth Hotel. Local graphic designer Colin Bolger designed labels for commemorative bottles of water for which people gave donations. It is hoped that, after testing, the Council will be able to exploit the water supply to sell as bottled mineral water.
To mark the historic occasion members of the Friends committee dressed up variously as a monk, a well wench, a water hawker, a leper, a fisherman, a smuggler and Sir William Rose, who donated the site as a public water supply in 1885. The Friends are now hoping to restore the former fishermen’s dock on the nearby edge of the harbour.
At last one of Christchurch’s oldest links to antiquity has been saved from destruction, said Friends committee member Tim Baber. The water looks absolutely crystal clear and we hope the testing process has a positive result.

The plan is to establish the wholesomeness of the water beyond doubt, improve the circulation of the water by various means if appropriate, and further enhance the plot now that more of its history is understood.
A first water test has been made thanks to our sponsor, and apart from 4 rogue coliforms that compromised a clean sheet in the first test, the water has all the qualities of an exceptional untreated mineral water, being exceptionally low in harmful heavy metals. [see table].
Reputed to be a never-failing supply, this water (given to the town as a public supply) could be relied on to furnish the needs of Christchurch in any drought or other emergency.
If treated with chlorine, like our own tap water there could be no objection from the authorities from these first results. Untreated it is arguably still better than what comes through your taps, not least because what comes through your taps treated becomes a controversial cocktail including known carcinogens according to biologist Julie Stauffer in Safe to Drink? The quality of your water ( ISBN 1898049149.)
With a little work (that we overlooked in our haste) those irritating 4 rogue but probably benign coliforms should be dispatched from Tutton’s Well, and it will become; as an untreated supply no less, once more, the Christchurch Elixir of old, capable if bottled and sold on terms favourable to the council of making the borough a wealthy, healthy and pleasant place to live.