White Wells is a small stone bathhouse on the edge of Ilkley Moor, built around a natural spring and in use for cold-water bathing since at least 1703, later rebuilt with the two plunge baths that survive there to this day for visitors curious enough to try the genuinely bracing cold water for themselves. Long before it became a minor visitor attraction, the moorland surrounding it was already associated with fairies in local tradition, with one nineteenth-century source describing the ground between the foot of the West Rock and the old baths as a favourite resort of the fairy folk.
The best-known specific story dates to around 1820, when a man named William Butterfield is said to have opened the door of the Wells and found a band of small creatures dressed entirely in green, disporting themselves noisily in the water as though it were their own private bathing spot rather than his.
According to the tale, they scrambled over an eight-foot wall and vanished the moment he was noticed standing in the doorway. As with most fairy folklore of this kind, this reads as a traditional tale passed down and embellished over two centuries rather than a witnessed event with any independent corroboration, but it is a genuinely old piece of Ilkley Moor folklore rather than a modern invention, and the building itself, damp, dim and often deserted outside opening hours, does little to discourage the association even today.
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