Mermaid Pool

The Mermaid Pool

The Mermaid’s Pool near Kinder Reservoir, just down from Kinder Downfall is a lonely and desolate place where it is claimed that no animal can drink and no fish can live, yet this same water is a perfect place for an Atlantic Ocean Mermaid to visit.

It is said in local folklore that she visits the pool once every year at midnight on the eve of easter, if you look long enough and hard enough into the pool at this time and are lucky enough to catch a glimps of her, she may bestow the gift of long life upon you, the twist that is always present in folklore is that she also is said to occasionally do the opposite and pulls her victims to their death in the watery depths of the pool.

 

The Mermaid Pool

‘Where the dread downfall casts its awful shade
In a deep glen which rifted rocks have made;
Whose towering cliffs seem bury’d in the skies,
The Mermaid Pool (a weedy lake) now lies.

Tradition tells us, in times that have been,
The pool was deep, its banks around were green,
And on an Easter Sunday morning there,
The same which yet comes round once every year,
Just when the early dawn broke o’er the hills,
And shed grey twilight on the gloomy vales,
The mermaid might be seen (like nymphs of old,
Which poets feigned or superstition told);
Woman and fish strangely blended in one,
So fables tell, and so old legends run.

Now on the wave, greeting the new born day,
Now on the velvet bank in sportive play;
And when prevailed, the part of woman fair
Into flowing locks it curls its hair,
Breathes the soft zephyrs as they gently rise,
And its fair bosom heaves with human sighs,
But when the fish prevails, beneath the tides,
Like lightning it a scaly monster glides,
And in its watery cavern must remain
Till Easter Sunday morning comes again.’
 

One regular visitor to the pool on Easter Eve was  Aaron Ashton, a retired soldier from the nearby village of Hayfield. As far as is known, Aaron never saw the mermaid, but as he lived to the ripe old age of 104, dying in 1835, then perhaps he did brush her presence.