On the north coast of Trinity, between Bouley Bay and Bonne Nuit, Belle Hougue Point juts into the sea, and in the rough ground near it rises a spring called La Fontaine des Mittes.
Its oldest recorded reputation is as a cure. The guidebook A Week's Visit to Jersey, from the 1840s, says the water was good for the dumb and for sore eyes, without any story attached. That use lasted a long time: Francesca Bihet, in her chapter on Channel Island fairies, notes that when Giles Bois collected Jersey folklore in the late twentieth century people were still using the spring to bathe their eyes.
The legend came later. Octavius Rooke, in The Channel Islands: Pictorial, Legendary and Descriptive (1856), gave the first known version, sentimental and very Victorian. Two fairies, Arna and Aiûna (the spellings vary), lived at the spot and were sent away by God. As they left, a single pearly tear fell from each sinless eye, and the tears became the spring. The story was translated into French for the Almanach of the Chronique de Jersey in 1891 and then back into English for John L'Amy's Jersey Folk Lore, and it is now told on the Jersey Evening Post's fairy trail and on local folklore blogs.
Bihet describes the legend as contentious and suggests Rooke may simply have invented a dedicatory tale for a pretty spring. If so, it is a good example of how a Victorian writer's decoration can become 'traditional' within a couple of generations. The healing water, though, seems to have been a genuine piece of island belief.
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