This paper reports on advancements of our current understanding of boiling phenomena, and presents a comparison between modelled and measured bubble growth in pool boiling of water at atmospheric pressure. A mechanistic model to compute i) the growth rate of a vapour bubble due to evaporation of the surrounding heated liquid, and ii) the instantaneous hydrodynamic reaction forces that the bubble experiences as it grows while attached to a solid surface, was applied to predict bubble behaviour in "isolated-bubbles" nucleate boiling conditions. Two test cases from an experimental data set have been considered in conditions where a vapour bubble appears at the boiling surface at a cycle-averaged local superheat of 5 K and 7 K. The experimental methodology uses rainbow schlieren deflectometry to map the local changes to refractive indices and subsequently the two-dimensional temperature in liquid phase. The same experimental conditions have been analysed with Interface Capturing Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations whereby the instantaneous behaviour of the vapour-liquid interface, the rate of interfacial evaporation of the liquid and surface tension forces are calculated from direct numerical solution of the fundamental transport equations. Modelled bubble growth is sensitive to the initial conditions assumed to approximate the early stages of the growth of an isolated bubble; in particular, predictions of bubble growth rates depend on the initial value of the thickness of a near-wall superheated liquid layer inside which the bubble is contained during the initial stages of its growth. Experimental verification indicates nonetheless good overall agreement between models and measurements and increases confidence in current prediction methods for bubble behaviour in boiling.