Derbyshire well dressing

In Derby’s Quad arts centre the well dressers are hard at work. Before them is a 2ft by 4ft wooden frame into which a thick layer of moist clay has been smoothed. Onto it a design has been transferred from a pattern and the pin-pricked lines are being set out with pepper corns. Some of the shapes within the lines are being filled in with orange and lime green coloured chips of stone.

I’m invited to take part, and gingerly place bits of orange stone to create a flower petal within one of the outlines, but I find my fingers far too big and stubby for such delicate work. I press the chips too hard into the soft clay and my fingers become smeared with it.

What I am rather clumsily engaged in has an ancient pedigree. The dressing of springs and wells as a thanksgiving for the blessing of clean water has been a tradition in Derbyshire since, it is believed, pre-Christian times.

It is still a part of the rhythm of life in the Peak District. In Tissington, well dressing each Ascension Day can be traced back to 1349, and appears to have gained added significance in the 17^th century when it became a thanksgiving for escaping the plague, which ravaged nearby villages. Today, 80 or 90 towns and villages take part in the tradition, creating a total of around 350 dressings, and choosing a week between May and September in which to practice their art.

Yet what I am failing to help with seems to have little to do with any tradition of thanksgiving. For one thing, this dressing will be displayed in an arts centre rather than alongside a well or spring. For another, the theme of the illustration – the 40^th anniversary of the moon landing -- appears to have nothing to do with water; quite the opposite, given the arid condition of that lump of rock. Nor are the dressers using flower petals, which are the traditional ‘painting’ material for these portraits. But things are in their early stages. Between today – Tuesday – and Saturday when the dressing goes on display, it will be covered with thousands of flower petals, each pressed individually against the soft clay, and become a vibrant living portrait of a rocket leaving the bountiful earth and climbing through a hydrangea sky towards its destination.

So has well dressing become a secular enterprise? Yes and no.

I am fortunate to have met up with Glyn Williams, a foremost expert in Derbyshire well dressing, and he guides me in the art.

As we watch the well dressers at work, Glyn tells me that the simple, timeless tradition of decorating water sources with flowers and boughs was transformed in the nineteenth century. He says: “Well dressing in its simple form seems to have developed from a pagan custom of making sacrifice to the gods of wells and springs to ensure a continued supply of fresh water. Like many folk traditions, it was later adopted by the Christian Church as a way of giving thanks to God for His gift to us of water.

“The very elaborate well dressing that we see today seems to be a Victorian invention -- the Victorians were great ones for reviving ancient crafts and traditions – and it is this form of well dressing which is pretty well unique to Derbyshire.

“Often the dressing is to commemorate the arrival of piped water in the centre of a village from a distant spring, so these are more properly called tap dressings.”

On my way to meet Glyn, I take a sunny drive through the Peak District, and stop off at villages whose well dressing celebrations coincide with my journey, and which he has recommended as demonstrating some of the finest examples.

In Tideswell, (pictured top and left) a charming little market town far enough off the main road between Manchester and Chesterfield to escape the roar of traffic, I find the well-less setting of the churchyard of St John the Baptist housing two dressings. They have been created by children; one on the theme of Smile, Learn, Improve and Care, the other about an adventure camp trip called Escape from Wesley Island. The dressings are a good six feet square and full of colour. Meanwhile, in the church, is an exhibition of arts and crafts entitled Tideswell’s Got Talent. Clearly it has.

Elsewhere in the town there is a dressing at a water source. A modern fountain burbles at what was the site of the first piped water to the village, but its subject matter is secular: an illustration of Caernarvon Castle to mark the 40^th anniversary of the investiture of the Prince of Wales. Glyn tells me later that this, Tideswell’s main dressing, is always a portrait of a building.

Moving south on my way to Derby I come to the quiet village of Youlgrave , which has a 180 year tradition of dressings, as well as having the most tempting of inns. Here there are five dressings, including at the church, All Saints, and at a 1,500 gallon water tank known as The Fountain (sign in churchyard pictured below). 

A plaque commemorates the endeavours of the Friendly Society of Women who gave the village its first convenient supply when water was piped here from a spring at nearby Mawstone in 1829. There is a Biblical theme to several of Youlgrave’s dressings, with phrases such as “Where there is sadness, joy” and “Make me a channel of your peace” worked into the designs. The multicoloured carpets of petals that make up these dressings really are quite spectacular.

As at many centres, the Christian heritage of Youlgrave’s dressings is maintained with a blessing conducted by the vicar. The ways in which the dressings are made can also have Biblical significance. “At Tissington for example,” says Glyn, “they leave the flesh of the figures as plain clay, and that goes back to Adam being created from the clay.”

But, Glyn adds, the secular is in the ascendant. “Often, dressings celebrate anniversaries, or other events important to those who make them, and the links to water and the religious tradition are not maintained in many cases.” Charles Darwin is a big favourite this year.

“Schools like well dressing; it teaches about the environment, arts and crafts; they can get out in the country to gather the things they need to make the dressings.”

Glyn has created a comprehensive record of well dressings on his website*, and from the photographs there, it seems roughly 70 per cent are on secular themes. In some villages, there is a mix of religious and non-religious dressings.

This loosening of the ties to faith has concerned some clergy. In 2006 the Rev Andrew Montgomerie, Rector of the village of Eyam, refused to perform the traditional blessing ceremony on one of the village's three wells because it contained a representation of the Green Man. He told the Derbyshire Times: "To me this is a pagan symbol. As a Christian I see it as an inappropriate subject matter and I cannot be expected to bless it – I can't simply brush my beliefs under the carpet to keep people happy.”

Traditionally, Derbyshire’s Catholic churches have not taken part in well dressing. But in the past few years a handful have. Canon Daniel Bowdren has two churches – Immaculate Conception in the hamlet of New York near Charlesworth and St Charles Borromeo in Hadfield. He says: “We are in the last hiccup of Derbyshire here, quite a way from the heart of things, but we are very enthusiastic. Both my churches have wells in their grounds and we dress them both.

“About six years ago I thought why don’t we do it and found great enthusiasm – it becomes quite a cultic thing and people come from miles to take part. We have always had religious themes, this year at Immaculate Conception, which is the main focus of our efforts, our subject is St Paul, it being just the end of the year of St Paul.

“I use water from our well for baptisms and in mass -- I’m a liberal sprinkler of Holy water.”

While the well dressing tradition appears to be vibrant, it has ebbed and flowed in popularity. “There was a decline from the 1950s which I think was because we have become so work-orientated,” says Glyn, “and the current revival is a backlash against that.

“There was a peak of popularity at the millennium – then everyone seemed to want to do a well dressing, but since then there has been a falling off again.”

If dressing should decline, it won’t just be admirers of the tradition and the expertise of the dressers who will lose out. Among the most ardent admirers of the flower-filled designs are bees. “Bees love them,” says Glyn. “You’ll sometimes get bees all over them.”

 *Glyn Williams’ comprehensive guide to Derbyshire well dressing can be found at www.welldressing.com

Holywell Spring Water, Malvern

When Mike Humm takes an empty bottle, fills it with Holywell Spring Water and sends it trundling along his brand-new conveyor belt to be capped and labelled, he is reviving a tradition that dates back to 1558.

There are over 80 wells and springs in the Malvern Hills, but only one Holywell. As the bottle – one of the first to pass down this newly reopened production line -- clatters through the machinery, it picks up an elegant blue label that records its pedigree; as coming from the original source of world-famous Malvern Water.

And Holywell water really does have a grand pedigree. Queens from Elizabeth I to Victoria drank it and, in 1558, Elizabeth is said to have granted a man with the entertaining name of John Hornyold the rights to the well. Commercial bottling at Holywell began in 1622, and Schweppes came in 1850 to put things on an industrial scale and bring Holywell water to the masses. The following year they pulled off a publicity coup by having hundreds of gallons of water from the spring pumped in a spectacular fountain at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace.

So much for the glory days of Holywell.

It’s hard to imagine today that this woodland glade and the 1843 well house, said to be modelled on a spa building in Baden-Baden visited by the young Victoria, were once the hub of a major industrial enterprise. We are on winding Holywell Lane, away from Great Malvern itself and the other little towns with their famous wells and springs, at the very foot of the wooded slopes of the Malvern Hills. Yet photos in the new visitor’s centre at the well house show the carts and heavy horses, crates and bottles of what is proudly signed as The Holy Well Mineral Water Factory.

However, in the twentieth century, with the Schweppes bottling plant long transferred elsewhere in Malvern, there was a considerable decline. Twice in the last 40 years, bottling businesses at Holywell have gone bust; which must mean Mike is a man of faith.

I ask him about the name – particularly the holy part of Holywell. There is nothing in the exhibition, which Mike and son Rhys are putting the finishing touches to when I visit, about its origins.

Were there visions, miracles or a martyr associated with Holywell?

They look a little uncomfortable.

What about some cures then?

In May the Malvern Spa Association, which won the National Heritage Lottery Fund money that has helped revive Holywell, plus numerous other local projects, organised a blessing of the waters here by the Bishop of Dudley, the Rt Rev David Walker.

In his blessing he said: “We thank you that since time immemorial men and women have come here to take of the waters for restoration to health. We bless you for all those who have been cured by these waters.”

Mike won’t endorse such an idea. “We can’t make any health claims for the water,” he says.

Yet the well’s reputation for curing leprosy, eye disorders, ulcers, cancers and skin diseases dates back to the 12th century. There is talk of a St Oswald who is said to have revealed the medicinal powers of the well to a hermit in the hills. Monks supposedly wrapped cloths soaked in Holywell water around the diseased parts of patients. In the eighteenth century such wrapping was undertaken by Dr John Wall to treat ulcers and other skin conditions when he set up The Wells House, Malvern’s first water-treatment centre, a few hundreds yards up the lane from Holywell. In the 1840s Great Malvern became a hugely popular spa town where such hydrotherapy was widely practised. Dickens and Darwin both came to Malvern to, as it was known, ‘take the cure’.

Such claims were perhaps undermined when Dr Wall proclaimed: “Malvern Water is famous for containing just nothing at all.” He actually meant that the Precambrian rock it is filtered through left it incredibly pure.

Certainly it appears that Holywell’s reputation was very widely known in the early seventeenth century. Cora Weaver, co-author of Springs, Spouts, Fountains and Holy Wells of the Malvern Hills says: “I discovered in a parish register for Defford, which is to the south east of Malvern, a reference to a poor man – poor meaning sick – who had come from Leicester to take water at the Holy Well, but Holy had been crossed out and Malvern substituted. So whether there were two wells or whether the clergyman making the entry had second thoughts about describing it as such I don’t know. But for someone to come 70 miles means that the story of the healing powers of the well had spread very wide.

“But there was no ecclesiastical building close to Holywell, the nearest was a Benedictine monastery at Little Malvern, and that’s quite a way away.”

None of this diminishes the power and fascination of Holywell. I notice Mike and Rhys, in their literature, call themselves the custodians of the well: “We do see ourselves as custodians,” says Mike, “we have the privilege of taking this piece of heritage on to the next chapter and making sure it lasts.”

Not bad for someone who got into the water business by accident. Mike’s wife Marian was looking for a country cottage in 1999 and saw the one alongside the well house, which Rhys now lives in, was up for sale. When they spoke to the agent he ran through the details of the property and then said “and now the well…”

Mike says: “We thought he meant a hole in the back garden, but he told us there was a substantial additional building that had the well in it, but it was almost derelict. It would have put most people right off but he said ‘if you want a project…’” It turned out they did.

Once here, Mike found all sorts of people sidling up and saying: “Do you know how important this place is?” He soon learned. “One guy who had come up here to do some work told me later that he had had a wart on his finger, but that the day after he came here and touched the water it had cleared up.”

After leaving Mike and Rhys I visit a couple of other local wells. One, above Holywell, and among the sources that feed its 1,000 litre per hour flow, is called the Eye Well. The Victorians loved to visit such places and the well-graded paths that they created through the woods are still intact. Eye Well, reputed -- as you might expect -- to cure eye ailments, is actually eye-shaped: a rather weepy eye hole in the ground beneath a tree. Cora’s explanation for how it got its name might help explain the ‘miraculous’ effects attributed to Holywell water: “Lack of vitamin A and smoky rooms causes sore eyes, a prevalent problem during the Middle Ages.” Get out in the clean country air and the symptoms disappear.

I notice from Cora’s book that, just a few hundred yards to the south of Holywell, is Devil’s Well, about which she comments: “Its proximity to Holywell should not go unnoticed.”

It’s a pretty dank scramble down Tumuli Valley to get to it but, once there, I read: “This lonesome location is supposedly named after a mischievous character called Puck or Robin Goodfellow. Puck is immortalised in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In English folklore he is a fairy or hobgoblin. Using dancing lights he is reputed to mislead travellers and sometimes assumes an animal form. In ancient times, Robin Goodfellows were believed to be terrestrial devils capable of inciting disease and melancholy, driving the victim to despair, rage and fury. A cure was believed to exist in the Balneum Diaboli or Devil’s Bath, to purge the affected mind and body.

So, it seems that you could just as easily ascribe a cure to Devil’s Well as to Holywell. Perhaps there is nothing very holy about Holywell, but at least nobody is bottling Devil’s Water.

The Black Virgin of Willesden

As the Revd David Clues walked down Church Road in Willesden, in the deprived, multicultural London borough of Brent, he could see two men facing up to each other on either side of the four lane carriageway that leads from his 10^th century church towards Harlesden.

The argument was becoming heated. He recalls: “They were shouting, actually yelling at each other -- language I’d never heard before, and I thought I’d heard it all. As I drew alongside the one on my side he drew a bread knife and gestured with it. It actually ran across my stomach. I stopped dead, but he looked down and said ‘Ooh sorry father’ and put it away.”

Clearly, St Mary’s is not your typical place of pilgrimage. The picturesque Anglican church, dating from 938, is more suited to a serene English village than the busy roundabout on which it sits. Its graveyard backs on to the Church End Estate – not so long ago the murder capital of Europe, Fr David tells me.

But the church is home to a statue of the Our Lady of Willesden, and to a holy well. Each May, Fr David, his congregation and fellow pilgrims take an icon of our lady – the statue is far too heavy -- and process through the notorious estate behind the church.

“We had 110 pilgrims this year,” he says. “We go through the Church End Estate, which is still a place where knife and gun crime and drug abuse is endemic. It is a part of our reaching out. We cause great interest. People part to let the procession through and make the sign of the cross.

“We take balloons and let them go – having balloons is a way of getting noticed. This year the innovation was having prayer cards tied to them, and I put my website and email address on them to tell the person finding the balloon that we would be praying for them.”

In doing so, the pilgrims have revived a tradition of pilgrimage that, before the Reformation, saw many Londoners take a Sunday afternoon trek up the Harrow Road to St Mary’s at Willesden. Most famous among them was St Thomas More. More made his last visit in 1534, shortly before his imprisonment in the Tower to await trial for refusing to swear the oaths of succession and supremacy, for which he was beheaded in June 1535.

The saint knew Willesden well. His stepdaughter Alice was married to Sir Giles Alington, a wealthy local landowner, and More’s two daughters were married in Alington’s private chapel.

The origin of the shrine is obscure. The book Our lady of Willesden by Nicholas Schofield relates that the first mention of pilgrimages came in the thirteenth century, and water from the holy well was said to be particularly good for the eyes. There are mentions of a vision of Our Lady near an oak tree in the churchyard and the appearance of a spring, but little more is known. There are no recorded miracles, nor a martyrdom.

But, according to church records from1249, there were two statues, one ornately jewelled and decorated, blackened, it is believed, by candle smoke and incense and known as the Black Virgin of Willesden. It was burned in the garden of Thomas Cromwell’s house in Chelsea when the shrine was suppressed in 1538.

The revival of veneration at St Mary’s is recent. Open air processions were reintroduced in 1903, and a statue of our lady, later gilded, placed in the church in 1911. Interest was heightened further in the latter decades of the last century. A new statue of the Black Virgin, in blackened lime wood, was carved in 1972, and the well was rediscovered in 1997 –  before that it had been declared insanitary and capped off.

Today, bottles of holy water are dispensed from the vicarage door. Water is also piped from the well in the vicarage garden into the church. At first, water was drawn from the dank basement by bucket, and I go down the steps to the eerie, dark and flooded cellar for a look, but now it is pumped up to a slightly incongruous garden centre water feature that Fr David would like some day to replace. “But it does the job” he says, twisting the tap to release a trickle of water.

The holy well is once again a draw: “I am always getting calls from people saying do you have the well and can I get the water from it?”

But St Mary’s is not the only place in the borough of Brent at which Our Lady of Willesden is venerated. Walk a mile or so down Church Road – which follows the old pilgrimage route, so you will be walking in the footsteps of St Thomas More -- into Craven Park Road and then Nichol Road and you come to the Catholic National Shrine to Our Lady of Willesden, which is actually in Harlesden.

Here there is also a statue of the Black Virgin. Fr Stephen Willis explains that it was carved from the bough of an oak tree that overlooked the shrine at St Mary’s in 1892. “The statue is our link in to the history,” says Fr Stephen.



Here there are two main pilgrimages a year: “In May we have a street procession, we go to one of the local schools, Jesus and Mary School, and in October a torchlight procession through another part of the parish.”

Yet, despite their close proximity, the two shrines do not join together in venerating Our Lady of Willesden. “There was a period of ecumenism in the Eighties,” says Fr Stephen, “but now they are separate.”

Nevertheless, the revived Catholic tradition is a rich one. Once a Catholic presence had been re-established in the area in 1885, the goal was to build a great shrine to our lady where pilgrimages could once again flourish. The first took place in 1894, the present shrine church with its large side chapel to Our Lady of Willesden was opened in 1931 and, to mark the Marian Year of 1954, declared by Pope Pius XII, a great pilgrimage was organised.

Fr Stephen says: “Ninety-four thousand pilgrims crowded into Wembley Stadium for a Marian pageant where the statue of the Black Virgin was crowned by Cardinal Bernard Griffin. Infact she already had a crown, carved in the wood, and that had to be cut off so that Our Lady and the bambino could be crowned with flowers.

“Then the statue was drawn through the streets on a litter from Wembley to here.”

Like Fr David, Fr Stephen sees his role as one of outreach, and says it is not at all inappropriate that a pilgrimage to Willesden and Harlesden will not be a serene, bucolic experience. “A pilgrimage to Willesden was a gritty, grimy affair in the Middle Ages and it still is today,” he says.

“This was built to be a shrine church, and that means a greater openness, more outreach than in an ordinary parish. To be the director of a shrine is to be more than a parish priest. A pilgrim church is more open. This is the only church around here open all the time, from 8.30am to 8pm.”

This church too has been visited by a saint. St Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, was a frequent pilgrim in the 1950s. At the millennium the church was made a centre of devotion for the Holy Year of 2000, where pilgrims could gain the Jubilee Indulgence and, in 2002, the Guild of Our Lady of Willesden was set up under the presidency of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor to revive the shrine as an active sanctuary of prayer for the needs of London.
And yet, as at St Mary’s, I get the feeling that it is a relatively small, loyal band of pilgrims who keep the tradition alive. It seems a shame that their veneration should be divided, with separate shrines, statues and pilgrimages. Particularly when you learn of the close personal bond between the keepers of these Anglican and Catholic shrines.

As father David told me as I left him for Harlesden: “Father Stephen and I were both ordained at the same time by Bishop Graham Leonard.” In one sense their ways parted when Fr Stephen came to the Catholic Church in 1996, and yet in another sense they have been reunited, for they both came to Willesden in the same year, 2003.

Could there be God’s hand in this, I wonder?

Fr David grins: “Very possibly.”

Our Lady of Wedale, Stow, Borders

The traveller in the Scottish Borders has plenty of history to savour. Indeed, the very road bears brown tourism signs that announce: “You’re travelling on the A7 Borders historic route between Carlisle and Edinburgh”.

Pull over in the village of Stow, seven miles north of Galashiels, and you’ll find a rather faded board by the river that offers a range of local historic attractions. It recommends you visit Midlothian for its connections with mining, and Abbotsford for Sir Walter Scott’s house.

A separate board tells you about the remains of the handsome 17th century bridge that spans Gala Water, the slow dark river that winds south before you. It is headed, rather mysteriously, A Bridge to Heaven.

But the bridge only goes to a field, whereas, if you take the riverbank path to your left, and cross a rough pasture called Our Lady’s Acre, you will come to a well, Our lady of Wedale, which has been a site of Marian devotion for at least 1,200 years. But there is no sign to tell you about this.

Which is odd, because Our Lady’s well is not just an ancient, long-forgotten place of veneration. It was restored for the millennium after centuries of desecration and neglect, and is once again a place of regular, organised pilgrimage.
Fortunately, I have a guide: Jane Rice of the Stow Pilgrimage Society. Without Jane I would never have found this place.

If I were a pre-Reformation traveller following this ancient, sheltered valley route to Scotland’s capital, I would have rounded a bend into this wide green valley and found before me a major site of medieval pilgrimage. There was the well and its attendant well chapel, but also a separate shrine church – it could have been on the site of the current village church, which bears the name of Our Lady of Wedale -- and a grand hall.

I would be approaching a place from Arthurian legend. The oldest surviving record to mention Wedale – which means valley of the shrine -- comes from the Welsh monk Nemius, in the ninth century. According to him, King Arthur received a vision before a great battle, in which Mary promised victory to a Christian champion. Arthur is said to have fought with an image of Our lady and the Holy Child on his shield. He won and, in gratitude, brought a fragment of the True Cross to Wedale, and a statue of Our Lady from Capadocia, and placed them in a church he built in her honour.

In Nemius’s account, from 826, the statue had already been damaged in the border wars but was still held “in great honour and veneration”.

Honour and veneration are not what immediately come to mind as we stumble cross the rough pasture today. Indeed, I’m beginning to wonder where the well can possibly be until Jane points and says: “There it is. It’s just a fenced-in tree.”

That of course is not all that it is, and certainly not how Jane sees it. She was one of a small band who decided that this ancient place of veneration must be restored. She became a founder member of the Stow Pilgrimage Society. “I got involved because I thought ‘what a shame’. How sad to see this place so badly neglected. Sad it’s not being looked after.”

We come to the well enclosure, isolated in the middle of the field, and open the gate. I find, hidden by the lush wildflowers that the fence prevents cattle and sheep grazing on, a waist-high rough-stone enclosure rather like a sheep pen. A gap in the wall lets on to the well, which is protected beneath an earth-covered stone dome.
A couple of steps lead down to the well itself; water just a few inches deep, crystal clear and perfectly still, held in a natural stone trough. And I realise that this is properly a well, rather than a spring as many holy wells are. It appears to have no outlet; to be just an oblong of water. The well looks rather like a cattle trough which, indeed, it had been reduced to before the millennium renovation.

For the destruction wreaked at this site did not end when the Reformation had run its course. Vandalism and desecration meant that, by the start of the last century, barely a sign remained. A great boulder said to bear the imprint of Our Lady’s foot -- where she had alighted to speak to Arthur -- had been broken up and used as hardcore on the turnpike road. As recently as 1963 the remains of the well chapel were bulldozed to create a farm access track.

Yet folk memory of Our Lady of Wedale persisted in a place where the Reformation was slow to take hold, and traces of Marian devotion survived for some time. In the 1650s, a group of locals who had tried to cure minor ailments by drinking water from the well were tried for witchcraft.

The village game of Stow handball, a local custom believed to be a remnant from ceremonies at the medieval pilgrims’ well, also survived the Reformation. In it, two teams of local men fought for possession of a leather ball. Each had a goal to aim for, and for the team made up of married men and shepherds, it was Our Lady's Well. If successful, they dipped the ball into the water three times -- in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The unmarried men tried to get the ball to a high point on Craigend Hill.
Our Lady of Wedale’s fortunes only improved a decade ago, when villagers from Stow, Ettrick and Lauderdale restored the well, and it was blessed and rededicated by local Episcopalian, Roman Catholic and Church of Scotland clergy. Since then the Fraternity of St Boisil, the Scottish Guild of Servers has, together with the Stow Pilgrimage Socety, organised annual pilgrimages at the feast of the Assumption in the hope of fostering devotion to Our Lady and re-establishing the ancient shrine.

Yet they have not found this an easy task.

Jane says: “There was great interest in the millennium year, but it has trailed off since then. In 2001 the outbreak of foot and mouth disease prevented the ceremony taking place, and the last two years there has been terrible weather: torrential rain. If that happens they let us use the church, but there is absolutely no local interest in the well.”

Instead, she says, members of the congregation of St Andrews Episcopal church in Kelso, over 20 miles away, have been the driving force.

“What we need is someone in the village who would get involved. They are very good in letting us use the church, although one year we got a complaint that we had used too much incense!”

The society invites a different celebrant each year. Jane says: “We have an ecumenical service, we give full communion at the well, but sometimes the wind has played havoc with the communion wafers.

“Anyone is welcome, it just happens that we are Episcopalians who have picked it up. It is a lot of work, but worth it. In a good year we get 50-60 pilgrims, if the whether is poor it can be as low as 15.
“We try and get the word around, we’ve managed to get into some of the diocesan magazines, not others.”
Ian Miller, the pilgrimage society’s historian, says: “Devotion to our lady has been very much neglected in Scotland, and we feel it is vital that as many people as possible get to know about Wedale as a place of pilgrimage and about its Holy Well.”

Ian has done a deal of research into the history of the site. Thanks to the Benedictine monk Michael Barnett, he says, fragments of prayers related to Our Lady of Wedale were published around 1910. Among them is this:

O Mary, tender-fair, gentle-fair, loving-fair,
Mary beloved! Mother of the white lamb!
Our Lady of Wedale, pray for us!

But, with the rekindled tradition of pilgrimage to Stow – which means holy place -- still frail, perhaps Our Lady of Wedale could do with our prayers.

Stow Pilgrimage Association, 10, Harrietfield, Kelso, Roxburghshire, TD5 7SY
info@stowpilgrimage.org

St Winefride's Well, Holywell, north Wales

The waters of St Winefride’s Well never waver from an icy 50 degrees farenheight. To plunge in fully clothed can take your breath away. Yet, even on an overcast and cloudy day, the pilgrims are not deterred.

As I sit with Fr Salvatore Musella, the Superior and parish priest, on a bench at a little distance from the bathing pool that is fed by the well, a family of pilgrims slip, one by one, beneath the guard chains and into the chill waters.

St Winefride’s is unique, in both its history and its remarkable physical presence. For 13 centuries this shrine in the tiny north Wales town of Holywell has been a place of unbroken veneration. Right through penal times the pilgrims still came. And the glorious, early 16^th century, two-storey Gothic shrine building – a crypt into which the well rises tucked beneath a chapel – was never damaged, and remains intact today.

The only modern touch is a row of rather cheery yellow and blue changing tents alongside the bathing pool.

Fr Salvatore explains that, once they have entered the 3ft deep waters, pilgrims follow the tradition of walking three times around the pool, then kneel on a stone and kiss a cross cut into the bath’s edge.

This group of pilgrims is a big, extended family from Ireland, and first parents, then grandparents and finally children slip into the waters. Even the babies have their heads dipped.

The shrine building was built -- probably partly through the munificence of Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort -- by the Cistercian monks of nearby Basingwerk Abbey, to replace an earlier building. Richard III was an earlier royal patron. He ordered the sum of ten marks to be paid annually from the treasury for the support of the chapel of St Winefride, and the stipend of the priest. Henry V made the pilgrimage in 1415 after his victory at Agincourt. Henry VII is said to have made a secret visit here before winning his crown at Bosworth in 1485.

In 1605, many of those involved with the Gunpowder Plot came with the Blessed Father Edward Oldcorne to give thanks for his deliverance from a gangrene that had formed in the roof of his mouth or, as some have it, to plan the plot.

Every minute, 3,000 gallons of water surges up through the 7ft deep, bottle green waters of the well basin, which is enclosed by an octagonal parapet from which eight columns rise to meet overhead in a traceried canopy, forming a crypt. The surface of the well shimmers like hot oil as the waters rise and flow into a narrow piscine and out to the bath, from which they run down Greenfield Valley to the River Dee.

Fr Salvatore, a jolly, smiling young man from Naples, is telling me: “People come with a great need, and with great faith” when the grandmother from the family group approaches. “Father,” she asks, “will you say a prayer for my family? You see that girl there in the blue, last week she had an awful turn and she has four children and we’re worried, so if you could say a prayer for her.”

Fr Salvatore nods and murmurs: “Of course, of course.”

When she has gone he says: “You see? This happens all the time, all the time.”

Fr Salvatore is of The Society of Divine Vocations, known as the Vocationist fathers, and he and his community of two other priests and two novices were entrusted with St Winefride’s in April 2008. Traditionally it was in the hands of the Jesuits. The Vocationists have a thriving centre here, with facilities for first communion and confirmation groups, those on retreat, a gift centre and museum. There is also a guest house for 31 visitors, run by Bridgettine Sisters, just up the steep hill towards Holywell, and opposite the Catholic church of St Winefride, where Fr Salvatore is parish priest.

In the relatively short time he has been here, Fr Salvatore has seen much evidence of how vibrant the tradition of pilgrimage is. In his first year, 1,000 came on the National Catholic Pilgrimage, held on the Sunday after the saint’s day of June 22. This year it was 1,500. With many other events, including an Orthodox pilgrimage, another for the Latin Mass Society, and individual visits, there are a total of 35,000 pilgrims a year.

Very often those pilgrims come with a powerful belief that they will be helped.

“We have mass here every Sunday at the well,” says Fr Salvatore. “Three or four weeks ago we had our bishop here to say mass and it was very well attended, he was giving the rite of anointing, and a woman said to me ‘last year we brought our daughter who was three years old. She couldn’t walk and we put her leg in the water and now she is walking’, and she had brought the shoes to leave with us.

“Another time there was a son in a wheelchair and they lowered him in the chair into the water. Nothing happened but it shows the level of faith that people have.”

Surviving records of cures date from the 12^th century. There is a collection in the exhibition centre of crutches discarded by pilgrims, and in the library hundreds of letters testifying to cures over a period of 150 years.

So, I ask, are miracles occurring at St Winefride’s?

“We don’t talk about miracles,” says Fr Salvatore, “but rather special grace, spiritual favours. There are celestial favours and intercessions that occur through St Winefride.” And he reiterates: “People who come have great faith, and there is great peace here.”

This is a place in which many, he says, begin their journey towards God.

“A woman said to me I’m not Catholic or Anglican but I believe in St Winefride.”

So who was St Winefride? According to the legend, Winefride was the victim, in 660, of an attempted rape by Caradog, the son of a prince who, when she fought back, cut off her head with his sword. The well is said to have erupted at the spot where her head came to rest. But Winefride was restored to life through the prayers of her uncle St Beuno, and she lived as a nun until her second death, 22 years later. Whatever the truth of the legend, Winefride and Beuno did exist.

Fr Salvatore sees the reasons why people come to St Winefride’s as being far less important than the fact that they do. He talks of St Winefride as a Welsh Lazarus, and the truth at the core of her story as being that, like Lazarus, Winefride pointed towards the resurrection of Jesus, and beyond Jesus, to the eventual resurrection of all who would believe in Him.

As is said on the shrine’s website: “How is one to interpret the legend, without explaining away the truth that countless numbers of people down the centuries have found at its core?”

At its core, that truth is about faith and hope. Fr Salvatore says: “This place can be a starting point for people. It can expand their own faith. Their faith can develop from here; it is the start of their journey of faith.”

And, as a Vocationist father, he sees a visit to St Winefride’s Well as being an aid to vocation in the broadest sense.  

“Our role is to foster vocation, but we also try to help people, especially young people, to find their own vocation in life; God’s will for them.

“This place is very important; we meet a lot of people here, from very different social levels. We can help them discover how to live, their vocation as a Christian.”

And there can be no profounder meaning to the story of St Winefride than that.