Crazywell Pool

The popular version runs like this: Crazywell Pool, a substantial pond on the western moor between Burrator and Whiteworks, is bottomless. Or nearly so. And it is an omen. If the water suddenly rises or stirs without cause, someone locally will die soon after. The pool has a reputation as an unlucky place, and the name itself (nobody quite agrees why it is called Crazy) adds to the sense that something is not quite right there.

As for where this comes from: I have not traced it back further than Legendary Dartmoor (Brewer, 1994), which records it as local belief. The written trail is short, and I cannot point you to much older documentation. Like a lot of moorland superstitions, it may simply be one of those half-remembered, half-made-up tales that attach themselves to distinctive places and water, especially deep water. Whether it was genuinely told as an omen legend fifty or a hundred years ago, or whether it is a modern Dartmoor story of the kind that gets attached to pools and wells, I do not know. Worth a visit all the same, if you are in the area.

Sabine Baring-Gould, writing in A Book of Dartmoor (1900), recorded the pool's death-omen legend directly from a named source: "An old lady, now deceased, told me how that as a child she dreaded going near this tarn, she lived at Shaugh, fearing lest she should hear the voice calling her by name."