I have lived in Havant long enough to know that it is very easy to pass through it without really seeing it.
On the surface, it is a Hampshire market town surrounded by housing, roads, shops and the familiar landscape of everyday life. Yet beneath that modern layer is something much older. Springs still rise from the ground. Roman roads cross the area. Villas remain beneath fields and buildings. Medieval churches stand beside the remains of grand houses. Old woodland reaches towards the South Downs, while only a few miles away the landscape opens into mudflats, tidal creeks and the waters of Langstone Harbour.
The more I have explored Havant, the more I have come to see it not as a collection of separate historical sites, but as a landscape connected by water, movement and memory.
As a witch with a longstanding fascination with folklore, ancestry and sacred landscape, I find those connections difficult to ignore. Some are firmly rooted in archaeology and documented history. Others belong to folklore, earth mysteries and my own interpretation of place.
For me, both matter.
The history tells us what happened here. Myth and sacred-landscape practice invite us to ask what those places mean to us now.
A town born from water
Water sits at the very beginning of Havant’s recorded story.
Havant Borough Council’s heritage trail identifies Homewell Spring as the only one of Havant’s springs still openly visible and says it is almost certainly the Haman Funta from which the town took its name. The place-name appears in a charter of AD 935 and is generally understood as meaning Hama’s spring. Havant Borough Council
That alone changes the way I look at Havant. Before the shops, roads and housing estates, there was the spring.
Water rising through chalk and earth created a place around which people could settle. Over the centuries those waters supported everyday life and industry. Homewell Spring became particularly important for parchment manufacture, while Havant’s plentiful water also supported brewing and other trades. Havant Borough Council
It is tempting to speak about sacred water only in terms of distant wells hidden in wild landscapes. Yet one of Havant’s most significant springs sits quietly within the historic town itself.
You can walk past without ever considering what has been flowing beneath your feet for centuries.
Homewell and the Roman well beneath a garden
Perhaps the most intriguing evidence of Havant’s relationship with water came from somewhere wonderfully ordinary: somebody’s garden.
In 2013, archaeologists excavating at Homewell House, a property behind St Faith’s Church, uncovered a Roman well only a few feet beneath the ground. The well was dated to around AD 250 to 280 and had been carefully constructed from stone brought from the Isle of Wight. Antiquarian’s Attic
Inside it were Roman coins and a bronze ring engraved with an image of Neptune, the Roman deity closely associated with the sea and waters.
Then came the discovery that made the excavation considerably stranger.
At the bottom of the well were the remains of eight dogs. Archaeologist Dr Andy Russel described the deposit as highly unusual and said he had never encountered anything like it in a Roman pit or well before. Ritual sacrifice was raised as one possible interpretation, although the precise reason the animals were placed there remains uncertain. The skeletons also showed healed injuries, adding further unanswered questions to the site. Antiquarian’s Attic
That uncertainty is important.
We cannot simply declare that this was unquestionably a sacred well or that we know exactly what happened there. Archaeology rarely gives us such neat answers. But neither should we dismiss what was found.
A substantial Roman well. Coins. A ring carrying Neptune’s image. Eight dogs deliberately deposited at its base.
All within a town whose recorded name itself is rooted in a spring. For someone interested in sacred landscape, that is an extraordinary convergence.
Roman Havant beneath the modern town
The garden well is not an isolated piece of Roman archaeology.
Several Roman villas have been recorded in the Havant area, and a particularly substantial complex lies close to present-day South Downs College. The site was first excavated in 1926, while a geophysical survey carried out in 2018 confirmed that the remains of a villa and six or seven ancillary buildings, including a bath house, still survive below ground. Finds have included imported pottery, Roman coins, painted plaster, mosaic tiles and roofing material. Havant Borough Council
This was not a minor rural outpost. The archaeological evidence points towards wealthy Roman occupation within a wider landscape of roads, villas, workshops and settlements.
Roman routes also linked Havant with the surrounding area. Evidence indicates connections south towards Langstone and Hayling Island and north towards Rowlands Castle, where Roman pottery and tile manufacture became an important industry. Archaeological work around Rowlands Castle has uncovered kiln remains, pottery waste, ash and evidence of sizeable Roman clay-working activity. Rowlands Castle Heritage Centre
These roads are particularly fascinating when thinking about landscape symbolically. They were practical routes first, carrying people, goods, clay, food and information. Yet roads also create lines. They connect settlements. They bring distant places into relationship with one another.
Long before anyone began speaking about ley lines, human beings were already drawing meaningful lines across the land.
Neptune, Minerva and the wider Roman landscape
A few miles east of Havant, Roman Chichester was known as Noviomagus.
An extraordinary first-century inscription discovered there records a temple dedicated jointly to Neptune and Minerva, constructed under the authority of the British client ruler Togidubnus. The inscription dates from roughly AD 43 to 80. Roman Inscriptions of Britain
Minerva was not simply a Roman water goddess. She was primarily associated with wisdom, craft, knowledge and strategy. Yet in Roman Britain she could also become connected with sacred waters through the blending of Roman and local religious traditions, most famously in the worship of Sulis Minerva at Bath.
That makes the Chichester dedication particularly interesting to me. Neptune and Minerva. Water and wisdom. Only a short distance from a settlement whose identity grew around springs.
I am not suggesting that this proves the people of Roman Havant worshipped Minerva at Homewell. We do not have evidence for that. But as somebody who reads landscapes through myth as well as archaeology, I find the regional relationship fascinating.
Ancient religion did not exist in the tidy categories we sometimes impose upon it now. Roman beliefs met local beliefs. Deities were interpreted through existing places and traditions. Springs, wells, rivers and coastlines could carry practical, symbolic and religious meaning at the same time. That possibility is worth sitting with.
From spring to tide
Follow Havant south and eventually fresh water gives way to the tidal landscape of Langstone Harbour.
Langstone developed at an important meeting point between land and sea. The wider landscape contains evidence of Roman occupation, including a villa north of the village, while by the medieval period Langstone had become Havant’s recognised port.
This is another aspect of Havant that fascinates me. Water does not remain in one form. It rises as spring water inland, moves through streams and channels, and eventually reaches the tidal threshold where freshwater and sea meet.
Langstone therefore feels like another kind of boundary. Land and water. Fresh and salt. Arrival and departure.
The remnants of the old oyster industry add another historical layer to that relationship between people and the harbour. Today the harbour is also a landscape of ecological importance, shaped by tides, birds, mudflats and the continuing interaction between human settlement and water.
I want to explore Langstone properly in a separate article rather than reduce it to a paragraph here, because its history deserves more space.
Warblington and the landscape of memory
East of Havant lies Warblington, where the landscape changes again.
The surviving remains of Warblington Castle belong to a substantial Tudor courtyard house built for Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, between approximately 1514 and 1526. The house was largely demolished during the Civil War in 1643, leaving part of its gateway tower standing beside the older church landscape. Historic England notes that the Tudor building probably replaced an earlier residence, with a licence to crenellate granted for the site around 1340. Historic England
There is something particularly evocative about Warblington because different periods seem to sit almost on top of one another. Church. Burial ground. Tudor ruin. Older medieval history. Fields running towards the coast.
This is the sort of place where history does not feel safely packed away inside a museum. It remains visible in the landscape.
Warblington deserves its own story too, particularly because themes of memory, ruins, churchyard landscapes and old trees fit so naturally within The Creative Witch Journal.
Rowlands Castle, clay and fire
To the north, Rowlands Castle introduces another element to the story. Roman settlers exploited the area’s clay deposits to manufacture pottery and tiles on a significant scale. Archaeological evidence has included kilns, greyware pottery, ash and clay waste around places such as Durrants and Wakefords Copse. The area’s relationship with pottery and later brickmaking ultimately extended across many centuries. Rowlands Castle Heritage Centre
I love the elemental contrast this creates within the wider landscape. Havant has water. Langstone has tide and salt. Rowlands Castle brings clay and fire.
None of that proves an esoteric system beneath the landscape. It does, however, give us another way of noticing how geography shaped human settlement and craft.
People worked with what the land provided. Water. Clay. Wood. Stone.
The sacred and practical were not always as separate as we tend to make them today.
Staunton and the old Leigh Park estate
West of the historic town sits Staunton Country Park, another landscape with layers beneath the one we see now.
In 1802 William Garrett purchased what was then agricultural land and began transforming it into landscaped pleasure grounds and an ornamental farm. Sir George Staunton bought the estate in 1820 and developed it further, creating a lake and several follies while drawing inspiration from years spent travelling in Asia and Europe. Hampshire County Council
Today Staunton retains a remarkable collection of landscape features, trees and surviving fragments of that Regency vision.
I have my own relationship with this place. I once gathered there beneath alder, hornbeam, willow, oak and hawthorn near a spring, and what stayed with me long afterwards was not simply the ritual we had created but the feeling of the landscape itself.
Trees create their own kind of architecture. Water changes the sound of a place. A deer appearing unexpectedly between the trunks can momentarily alter the entire atmosphere.
I want to return to Staunton separately, because its history, trees, follies and older relationship with the Forest of Bere deserve more room than I can give them here.
Havant Thicket and the return of water
Havant Thicket adds an almost poetic contemporary chapter. Ahead of construction of the new reservoir, archaeological and metal-detecting work recovered objects including a Roman coin found in 2022, along with later coins and evidence of subsequent human activity on the land. Portsmouth Water
The site has been predominantly agricultural in more recent history, but investigation of the wider landscape has revealed traces of much older activity, and now water is returning on a vast scale. There is something compelling about that.
A landscape shaped by ancient water systems and human settlement is being transformed again through the creation of a reservoir.
Whatever spiritual meaning we choose to attach to that is personal. But the physical return of water itself is real.
And then there are the ley lines
Ley lines sit in a very different category from Roman roads, excavated villas and archaeological finds. They belong to the world of earth mysteries, landscape spirituality and modern esoteric tradition rather than established archaeological science.
I am comfortable saying that plainly.
I also believe there are patterns within landscapes that cannot always be reduced to the way a conventional map is read.
My own relationship with Havant has long included a sense of lines and connections running through this wider area, particularly between coast, spring, woodland and downland.
For me, ley-line practice is not about needing archaeology to prove invisible energy. It is a way of reading relationship. One place connecting to another. Water sources. Old routes. Churches. Ancient settlement. High ground. Woodland. Harbours. Places humans repeatedly returned to.
What fascinates me about Havant is that even if you remove the metaphysical interpretation entirely, the physical network remains extraordinary.
Roman roads really did cross this landscape. Springs really do rise here. Villas really did stand here. People moved between the coast and the Downs. Clay travelled. Goods travelled. Water flowed.
Churches, estates and settlements appeared along those routes. The landscape already contains threads.
My witchcraft simply invites me to look at those threads differently.
Sacred landscape does not require certainty
I think we sometimes make the mistake of believing we must choose between history and mystery. Either something is archaeologically proven, or it has no place within our spiritual understanding.
I do not see the landscape that way. History gives us evidence. Folklore gives us story. Myth gives us symbolism. Personal experience gives us relationship. One does not automatically prove the other. But together they can create a much richer understanding of place.
I can stand beside Homewell Spring knowing that Havant’s name has been connected with that water for more than a thousand years.
I can know that a third-century Roman well containing coins, a Neptune ring and eight dogs was discovered only a short distance away.
I can know that Roman villas and roads crossed the surrounding landscape, and then I can also ask what water means to me.
What thresholds mean.
Why humans repeatedly return to springs.
Why certain landscapes invite reverence.
The questions do not diminish the history.
They allow me to enter into relationship with it.
Walking Havant with different eyes
This is what I find increasingly fascinating about the place I live. Havant does not announce itself as a sacred landscape. You have to look. The spring rises quietly. Roman walls remain underground. A Tudor gateway stands without the grand house that once surrounded it. Old harbour routes have become roads. Clay pits become woodland. Country estates become public parks.
Water disappears beneath streets and then reappears somewhere else. The landscape does not preserve its history neatly. It layers one life over another. Perhaps that is why I find it so compelling.
The sacred does not always sit somewhere distant, wild or spectacular. Sometimes it is beneath the pavement. Behind the church. At the edge of a housing estate. Inside someone’s garden. Or flowing quietly beneath your feet.
Exploring Havant’s hidden landscape
This article is the beginning of a series exploring the places surrounding Havant through history, folklore and sacred landscape.
Over the coming pieces I will be looking more closely at Warblington, Langstone, Rowlands Castle, Staunton Country Park and Havant Thicket, following the history of water, roads, ruins, trees, craft and old stories through the landscape.
Because once you begin looking beneath the modern surface, Havant becomes a very different place indeed.