2nd March: Holy Wells Day

The feast of Ceadda, Celtic deity of healing springs, christianised as St Chad, patron saint of holy wells. Here are some things you may not know about holy wells:

1. There are thousands of holy wells in the British Isles. Some areas of the country have more than others. Over a hundred holy wells exist in Cornwall, for example. Other areas where there are a lot of them include South West Wales, Scotland, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. The East of England has relatively few.
2. What were they for? They are usually associated with healing, either generally, or for specific ailments, such as rickets. Infertility was a common reason for visiting some wells. Others were visited by people wanting to know the future, such as girls wanting to know who they would marry. A female oracle was often associated with a well.
3. While many holy wells date back to pagan times, often they became Christinaised and associated with saints or the Virgin Mary.
4. Usually healing or future visions were only granted if people visited at the right time and performed the right ritual before bathing in or drinking the waters. Typically, you would need to visit on the appropriate saint's day, or on one of the traditional festival days such as Midsummer or Beltane, usually at dawn. You would also have to approach the well from a particular direction and walk around it a certain number of times, often in silence.
5. Some of the requirements could be quite gruesome. In some places, the water had to be drunk out of a human Skull or a special cup made from a human skull. For example, Llandeilo in Dyfed, Wales, the waters had to be drunk from the skull of Saint Teilo, the titular saint of the ruined church in which the well was located.
6. It was common also to leave an offering behind. Coins and pins were commonly left. At some wells, a piece of rag would be tied nearby, for example, to a tree. The idea here was often that as the rag rotted, the disease would go away. So don't leave anything made of synthetic fabrics, just biodegradable stuff!
7. Another belief about holy wells was that they were entrances to the other world. As such they would have guardians, often a fish of some kind. In the waters of Ffynnon Gybi (Gwyneth, North Wales) it was an Eel and it was believed that if the eel came and coiled around the patient's legs, the request for healing had been granted, and if it didn't, they stayed sick.
8. The healing properties of wells may not be entirely down to superstition. Some wells actually do have healing properties because of the minerals in them.
9. Wells usually produce Water, but there are examples of some which are said to produce Milk on certain dates instead. At the well of St.Illtyd near Swansea, Wales, for example, milk is said to flow at midsummer.
10. Many British villages still hold annual well dressing ceremonies where the wells are decorated with flower petals, leaves, berries, moss, feathers, seeds and cones, sometimes arranged into pictures of Biblical scenes.