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Holywell

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"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?

Aye! What he said!

There do seem to be a lot of these wells that have been used for ceremonies of some kind right up until around, oh, at a gues, the 1930's or somesuch...

Some are still visited today, not just by the likes of me, but by people that have simply "always done it"... I can't remember who it was now that mentioned here recently about an elderly chap who still regularly said prayers at a particular well.

Do we have any geologists or similar that could verify something for me? Do these springs just suddenly appear? Or is it more likely that they HAVE been there for a very long time?

What I mean is, a lot of the wells that I see as being christianised - is it likely that they just "appeared" during christian times (as most of the legends now tell) or would they have been there ages before? It just seems an odd thing for a christian to do - revere a well or water source. Just seems to me to be more "natural" than a godly miracle... aargh! I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts properly! I just mean that these natural occurrences seem more likely to me to be appreciated by yer Pagans rather than yer christians, and that the latter would have nicked the idea like they always did to stop this ungodly lot from worshipping false idolos or whatever the hell it is they go on about! ;o)

Hmm?

G x

"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."

I forgot about this bit! Sorry Hob...

Aye. St Cuthbert... It seems to be dedicated to him, but I wonder if it's a variation of the name of the place - Cubert - that the well actually is? Or it could be that "Cubert" is a variation of "Cuthbert", I suppose? No answers here then! I'll look into it... Are you SURE they didn't drag his body round Cornwall as well? ;o) Now that WOULD be impressive...

G x