My 'best' ten wells of the very many I've stumbled across - not necessarily the most spectacular or historic, just the ones that mean the most to me. Hopefully they give you some idea of the amazing variety of these ancient sites.
This was the very first holy well I visited, on holiday in Wales in 1984. It sits in a tiny chapel on a scrap of grass just below the seafront, which has been identified as 6th-century but which could be of any date between then and about 1500. When we first saw it, the weather was dark and rain was whipping along the beach. There were other visitors, but the chapel, with its well beneath the stone altar, seemed forgotten and deserted. Over the following years it became a minor pilgrimage site, with people leaving flowers, prayers, and other offerings - rather fun! I and the Lady came here in 2005 (that's her in the photo checking her camera). There was a good flow of folk coming and going.
I first came here in 1985, once again in the rain! You have to traverse a caravan park, or you did then, and a couple of fields before reaching a tiny valley with the well-house beyond a restored stone arch. You can sit inside and watch the water should you be able to wedge yourself in. I found it a lonely, atmospheric place. Also known as St Cuthbert's Well.
This has become a favourite since our first visit in 1985. You walk down a path at the corner of the graveyard between a group of old lime trees known as the Twelve Apostles, and this lovely stone tank is at the bottom, slowly pouring water out through a stone channel and through the town. It used to be very atmospheric, but in Millennium year a new stone seat was put in alongside the well, and much of the undergrowth cleared away, so it no longer feels as isolated and lonely as it did.
Not many wells can boast their own restaurant and tea room! The Wishing Well was probably a 'proper' holy well once as it rises beside the church (see here for some Upwey graveyard pictures). Now it's a big round stone tank of beautiful clear water, flowing very strongly, with a mossy stone surround. They don't encourage you to drink from it now, but that doesn't stop us! The well sits in ornamental gardens that are always getting more elaborate. It's been a delightful place for us since 1986.
When I arrived in Oxford in 1988, this was the only holy well in the area I knew about. On my first lonely weekend I traipsed out here and it raised my dejection slightly despite the pouring rain. On my way back I met a cagouled couple on the lane who asked if it was the right way to the holy well! It was supposedly St Frideswide's retreat when she wanted to get away from her abbey at Osney, and in Alice through the Looking Glass it appears as the Treacle Well. The well is next to a lovely little church and is very pleasant to spend a while next to. Difficult to get a good photo though!
This is a deeply strange and mysterious place. You go down a footpath out of the churchyard, over a couple of stiles and through a field, and find the well set into a high grassy bank. Once beneath the entrance stone you're in another world. Steps lead steeply down to a small bowl of cold water barely visible in the dark, prickling with damp moss. I came here in 1989 and felt I was encountering something very archaic, very primal, and not entirely comfortable. But I'd go again.
I found this on a complete hunch in 1989. The Ordnance map showed a 'spring', that's all, at the bottom of SS Peter & Paul's churchyard. I thought I'd better check it out, and found - this! Amazing! Nobody had ever mentioned it, written about it, or published a photograph of it. Outside Cattistock it was presumably completely unknown. I suppose it was built when the church was reconstructed in the 1870s. What a find!
This was another unexpected find, like Cattistock, in 1995, so that's probably why I think more fondly of it than any other Kentish well I met. I'd seen it marked on the 1841 Tithe Map, and nothing else was known about it. I trotted down the hill from the church expecting to come across nothing more than a featureless spring, or not even that. Instead, there was this entirely within a hedge separating two fields. For all I knew it had been utterly ignored from 1841 to the time I found it.
Many wells have incongruous positions. Gorrick's Spring is by a layby on a main road, yet it has a very peaceful feel to it, surrounded by trees, with the water pouring from a rather battered stone lion's head beneath the steps as you can see. I enjoyed it when I came here in 2000 - even though I could find no sitting position on the wall on the right in which stones would not jab into my behind!
Quite a famous well, but still a sort of poor relation of the great pilgrims' well of St Winifred at Holywell in Wales. They seem to have both been built by Lady Beaufort in the 15th century, though, and this one still attracts pilgrims - when I and the Lady came here in 2005 there were coins and pictures of St Winifred left in the well-house. The little 'court house' on top - which may have been a chapel before it got used for legal purposes - is now owned by the Landmark Trust, so this is the only holy well in England that you can take a holiday in!
In October 2007 I took the plunge (not literally) and stayed at the Well. More can be read here.
