Funnily enough, I've been to 2 "holy" wells today - both in Oxfordshire.

<b>Fair Rosamund's Well</b> (<b>SP436164</b>) was quite uninspiring (Probably cos it was behind a locked wrought iron fence in the grounds of Blenheim Palace's - I hate that!) – I'm sure with a little TLC, it would be quite lovely… A large stone wall with the water gushing out near the bottom, through a metal mesh into a large rectangular pool. Would be such a lovely place to sit peacefully on a lovely sunny day like today…

The other - quite a lovely one - by the tiny church in Binsey, and dedicated to St Margaret (<b>SP486081</b>). Within the churchyard itself, it sits recessed into the ground, with stone steps leading down to it… The water is held in a perfectly circular, relatively modern, basin. Looks like it may have had a lid or door over it originally… A latin inscription dated 1874 above it states the English name for it – simply "<b>St Margaret's Well</b>". The legend is that Saint Frideswide, born in 680 to a christian nobleman, was pursued by the Mercian prince Algar, who wanted to marry her. She legged it off to Binsey where she worked as a swineherd for 3 years. Prince Algar, somewhere along the line, was blinded by lightning! Frideswide prayed to St Margaret of Antioch and caused the well to appear. She then cured the prince's blindness using the water. Powerful stuff, eh? ;o)

This story sounds familiar to me, although not using the same names… sounds like a christian modernization of an older story, maybe?

G x

"Sorry for going on!"

Nar you're not! Nor should you be. It's great to get your enthusiasm spoinging out of the screen.
I dunno what St. Cuddy was doing having a well in the sarf. He's a scots borders laddo. His body was taken on a on a very long walkies though, which is part of the reason he has a sacred well up near Bellingham in Northumberland.

There must be shedloads of wells that *could* be prehistoric sacred places. But how to determine provenance? Associated artifacts maybe? But then they'd have to be more than simply evidence of occupation, like flints etc. Such evidence wouldn't mean the well would have been held as having specialness. Unless you believe that prehistoric peoples held scared the places where they thought their ancestors had trodden.

There's a spot of RA I visited recently that is induibitably associated with a well/spring, but does that make the well sacred? It could be argued that the presence of what are assumed to be spiritually significant carvings imbues the spring with specialness. Depends on your interpretation of the rock art I guess. (Either way, the spring is now concreted over, and the carvings all but forgotten, which underlines the point that such weels should be documented as much as poss, if it's on tma or on the nascent goffnet).

It would seem a tricky business, this designation of sacredness. Same with sacred hills. I guess if you had access to prehistoric british equivalents of aboriginal australian songlines, you could argue that anywhere that was inhabited by people who remembered those songlines could be said to have been sacred. (Behold! The sacred twig of Waaaaalzend!)

Or maybe it's the recorded folklore?

I didn't realize that becoming someones Hero would bring forth such discussion!

As i said, I wasn't sure about putting the well on the TMA but.....

It is easy to take water for granted...you turn on a tap and there it is...fresh, clean and drinkable. We wash with it, we cook with it and we use it for power (occasionally) I spent Friday afternoon walking around Cardinham parish on the edge of Bodmin Moor, during the walk I came across a dried up ditch...I found out later it was the remains of a leat that took fresh water from a spring on the moor down to the village. It must have taken ages to dig this ditch through a countryside full of granite boulders...but they did it cos they had to.

If man finds fresh water then it is pretty special and I am sure the ancients thought of it as a gift from the gods. No, we have no way of proveing this...but then again we have no way of proving that a standing stone was put up to worship or just to make sure you didn't get lost on the way home from the chieftans orgy!

Good discussion

Mr H