Top image: Wishing well, wishing you well. Photo by Cora E. Edmonds. From The Healing Planet Project, an original documentary film which explores the healing traditions of cultures worldwide. www.healingplanet.tv

Real!! Alive!! Rarely seen!!

MISS LOTTIE LEEDHAM’S

L I V I N G

MYTHOLOGICAL

M E R M A I D

AND THE MAGICAL CAMBER WELL


Coming soon there is here, and only here, to be seen what you can see nowhere else, the lately rediscovered and highly-accomplished young mermaid of the Camber Well.


She combs her hair in the manner practised in China, and admires herself in a glass in the manner practised—everywhere. She has had the best instructors in every peculiarity of education, and can argue on any given subject, from the most popular way of preserving plums, down to the necessity of a change of Ministers.


She plays the harp in the new effect-ual fairystyle prescribed by Miss Elizabeth Jane Baldry, playing for you fairy music never before performed in modern times, having lain forgotten in the vast archives of the British Library. Its composers, once famous touring virtuosi, are now long dead and forgotten


Join us this mid-summers day, June 20th, and see the very spot where this attraction lies. Cast your coin down into the water and listen carefully. Make your wish for the future and hear a song from the past.


The spirals converging under the surface, they’ll take you where you want to go.1

MYATT'S FIELD  SATURDAY JUNE 20TH 2009  2PM- 7PM

1 Text based on the original 'Camberwell', Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878)


VISITING NEXT WEEK: Miss Lucy Wanmer, The Little Woman of Peckham. Strange but true.


The Camber Well

Believed by locals of the area to offer a portal to the past while having the ability to cast into the future & fortune of those who offered it a coin, it's waters were also said to contain healing properties and so the Camber Well attracted all manner of people and creatures to drink and bath from it.

Some believe that it was also the home of the Mythological Mermaid, a mermaid who was captured and put on show at the annual Camberwell Fair during the 1800s. Her eventual escape from the fair was around the time that the well was covered over and lost to all and so some say she is still hidden under ground within it.

It is suggested that her escape was made possible due to the help of her friend and fellow sideshow attraction Lucy Wanmer, otherwise known as The Little Woman of Peckham, and whose grave now lies in the churchyard of St Giles on Camberwell Church Street.