I went in search of this Well whilst 'in the area' recently and spent about 2 hours wandering around the Bell Alders Wood. Sometime in the last 30yrs a large pond and numerous new drainage ditches have been created to the west of the Wood and along its NW and S boundaries - which works seemed to have caused problems -
How the area has changed may be more easily appreciated by analysis of the Maps of the Area displayed by the Old Maps website, the pastscape website and the Flash Earth, Bing and Google aerial shots available as direct links from this page - up to 1985 no OS map shows a pond immediately to the NW of the Wood but it can clearly be seen with use of the Modern Maps and Bing etc aerial photos - to try to put it nicely the Pond recently looked like a fetid swamp (I say little else about its condition at this stage) -
On the ground it can be appreciated quite easily that the River Dore enters the Wood (and flows SE through it) just N of the 'pond' - the new drainage ditches proceed to the SW corner of the Wood (SE corner of the pond) and along the S boundary of the Wood - there is a strong flow along this new ditch - and therein lies the difficulty in finding the 'Golden Well or Spring' - the Well used to be midway along the S boundary of the Wood and its water used to flow easterly along a brook into the River Dore further E again within the Wood -
Put a little more graphically the new Ditch along the S boundary seems to connect a sump near the SE corner of the new Pond diverting the flow of other new ditches away from the pond but towards the Brook which used to have its source as the Golden Well - hence it is monumentally difficult to detect where the Well/Spring rises
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road