Bellingham is the last town along its road before the Scottish border, and here you find one of England’s better-known holy springs, St Cuthbert’s Well, gushing out of a fountain of rough stone in a lane down from the church: for some reason I pictured it as being in the middle of a field, but that was because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s also no more than three feet high!
Many people make it to ‘Cuddy Well’, but fewer pick their way along the lane beside the road at Brisco just south of Carlisle to find St Ninian’s Well beneath its Norman-style arch. This is the work of the idiosyncratic architect Sarah Losh: there is no record of it before she constructed what we see today, probably in the 1840s, so we’re not sure whether she invented it.
Meanwhile, next to the church Sarah Losh built in her estate village of Wreay, there seems to be another well, now dry. There are rails around it, steps down to it, and a gargoyle’s head at the bottom which must have been a water-spout. Jenny Uglow points out in her book about Losh’s work, The Pinecone, that the well seems to act as a drain for several sources of water in the vicinity of the church. Is this a holy well Miss Losh wanted, next to her own church with its strange and not-all-that-Christian symbolism? Nobody is sure what she meant by the image of the downward-pointing arrow.
While on my way to Bellingham I spotted another well on the map, with what looked like a fairly easy path to it, so I went to check. Lady Well at Nunwick, which is probably referred to (under Simonburn) in RC Hope’s Holy Wells of England, turned out to be a tiny moss-covered stone arch over a very active spring. I can’t recall ever seeing any images of this site though one neopagan artist seems to have been there!
Finally in the grounds of Lowther Castle we find Peg Hook Well. At least we do if we look hard, even with the aid of a map! It’s a stone structure covering a brick tunnel a few feet long, full of water. The current head gardener of Lowther writes that it’s really an ice house, but the old OS map – which names it as Peg Huck Well rather than Hook – shows an ice house some distance away, and it sits at the head of a pond, so I think it may be the real article.
Headley & Meulenkamp include Sarah Losh’s Brisco well as a folly, and I came across some others too. One of them is The Count’s House in Durham, a tiny classical temple down by the River Wear and which was built by the Dean & Chapter of the Cathedral in the grounds of a cottage where ‘Count’ Joseph Boruwlaski, the ‘Polish dwarf’, lived in the late 17- and early 1800s. H & M include the Count’s House, but not a classical seat decorated on its rear with grotesque stone faces, close by; this is ‘Cathedra’, an artwork created by sculptor Colin Whitbourn during a residency at the Cathedral in the late 1980s.
Now, coming across a folly which isn’t in Headley & Meulenkamp is the greatest thrill a folly enthusiast can enjoy; coming across four – well, I was almost overwhelmed. The great authors can be forgiven for not listing Durham’s Cathedra, given its recent origin, and the same applies to the castellated garden building I spotted by the path leading to Lady Well at Nunwick, as that bears the date 1987 on a stone. But Greenholme Lodge sits right by the A69 on the way into Carlisle. It seems to have been a gateway to Edmond Castle; because Robert Smirke designed that building, Historic England assumes he was responsible for the lodge too, but if so he must have had an off-day. It’s just a red stone Gothic façade whacked onto the front of an ordinary cottage.
A more serious omission is Lacy’s Caves, although admittedly I only discovered it while trying to find directions to Long Meg & Her Daughters. A sequence of five chambers with arched doorways and windows sits above the River Eden, hollowed out of the sandstone, like a rough hermitage for a rough hermit. The nutcase responsible is supposed to be Colonel Samuel Lacy of Salkeld Hall (owner 1790-1836), who entertained his guests there, although it would have been a bit of a jaunt if so. Nowadays there is a path to the Caves along the line of the tramway that once serviced the Long Meg Gypsum Mine: you can still see sleepers and couplings, chutes and steps, and, up a steep bank in the woods, graffiti-adorned mine buildings.
I’m not the only person to have noticed another feature of that path, but nearly: it’s a brick artwork laid into the ground, showing features of the River Eden between Langwathby and Culgaith, made by local schoolchildren. You are lucky if you can find it: a few more years and it may have disappeared entirely. Can you spot the 'Hermit' - looking a bit like a spaceman, to me?
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