It Really Is St Catherine's Well

Only able to visit places I can comfortably walk or cycle to (and at present nowhere is comfortable to cycle to) I've found myself going more often along the canal to St Catherine's Chapel south of Guildford, with its allegedly holy spring at the foot of the hill on which the chapel sits, a place which never fails to soothe and elevate my spirits. You may remember that nearly a year ago a landslip on the nearby railway line revealed another feature of the sacred landscape of St Catherine's Hill, a tiny shrine carved into the perilously soft sandstone, most of which had probably been destroyed when the railway went through in the 1840s. 

The organisation which carried out the investigation, UCL's Archaeology Southeast, recently posted a video on Youtube describing the site and its context (I am far from convinced about the apparently very settled boundaries of early Anglo-Saxon petty statelets, but we can let that go).  And in the course of it Dr Michael Shapland happens to mention St Catherine's Fountain, referred to, he says, in the 15th century. 

Now, the spring was long reputed to cure sore eyes and in the late 19^th century was drunk by children with sugar, as elsewhere. It’s clearly been turned into a picturesque feature at some stage, possibly in the 1800s, with the addition of a tiny stone bridge over the stream leading to a stone seat. As Jeremy Harte mentions in English Holy Wells (p.417), the earliest references to this site don’t give it a name any more specific than ‘Artington Spring’, and only in the 1920s is there any suggestion that it had any holy properties. It appears in a list of ‘holy wells in Surrey’ in Folk-Lore in 1952, but still without the name it definitely had acquired by the 1990s. 

Dr Shapland confirmed to me that the document in which the well is mentioned is an addendum to a grant of 1328 confirming the church of St Nicolas, Guildford’s ownership of the hilltop: the addendum lists the boundaries of the land in question, including the well. The document’s in the Surrey History Centre.

This is extremely interesting for three reasons! 

1. It shows that a late antiquarian or romantic guess that a well had a saint’s name can well be right.

2. It makes this is the earliest-attested well-dedication to St Catherine in England. There’s one in Exeter said by a Victorian author to appear in ‘ancient writings’, but we don’t know what they might be; and there are St Catherine’s Wells associated with chapels which are clearly medieval, but for which there is no documentary evidence.

3. It adds a holy well convincingly to a complex, layered ritual site, and opens up new questions about the chronology of St Catherine’s Hill. Dr Shapland also quotes the dedication of the chapel in 1329 by Bishop John de Stratford of Winchester which makes clear that the hill was already a site of popular devotion and ‘miracles’: this is precisely why the chapel is being built there. I think this suggests that the well would have been the focus of whatever miracles might have been taking place before the chapel was constructed; certainly there’s no other likely feature on the hill.

All in all, impressive for something we thought was just the result of early twentieth-century speculation!