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