Nanny Rutt is the name given to an old woman of Lincolnshire folklore, associated directly with an artesian spring, Nanny Rutt's well, located in Math Wood near Northorpe, within the parish of Thurlby close to Bourne. Her wild and unkempt appearance earned her a genuine local reputation as a witch among those who lived nearby. In the best-known version of the story, a young girl sets off alone through the wood one evening to meet a lover at the well, having secretly arranged to elope with him against her own parents' explicit wishes.
On her way through the wood, she meets Nanny Rutt, wrapped tightly in a shawl that casts a deep, obscuring shadow across her face, who warns the girl directly against the genuine dangers of the wood after dark, and against the folly of eloping without her own parents' blessing. The girl ignores this warning entirely and continues on to the well, where she waits a long time for a lover who, in the end, never actually comes to meet her.
By the time she finally gives up waiting, it is fully dark, and with her eyes clouded by tears and her vision already poor in the deep gloom of the wood, she becomes hopelessly lost among the trees. As an oral tradition passed down through generations, the tale naturally varies somewhat in its telling depending on who happens to be passing it on at any given moment, but the core shape, a wise or witch-like warning figure ignored entirely at real cost to the one who dismissed her, remains genuinely consistent across every version.
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