Viva La Muerte ...

... was how I greeted the two Catrinas I shared the train with as we disembarked at Waterloo on Saturday and got a big skeletal grin in reply. Later, while I and the others were at the Hoop & Toy not far from the V&A on Saturday afternoon I could glimpse a little anomaly on a picture frame next to our table: it turned out to be a very tiny ghost.

It's the season of the dead. I normally expect about 40 attenders at the annual Memorial Service on the afternoon of the last Sunday in October, and as the number of funerals we take declines, I always wonder how long this event has got to go, but this year roughly 60 souls turned up. The candles went up to the high altar to burn down as usual. 

Because of how the dates fall this year, there will be a number of occasions to mark the season at Swanvale Halt church should anyone feel inclined. We normally have a midweek mass on a Tuesday morning, joined on this occasion by a eucharist for All Saints tomorrow evening and then the All Souls Requiem Mass on Thursday. I wonder how many will venture out as Storm Ciarán gets going. But the swede lanterns are ready for action, even if they get blown out (as they often do). 

Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

Getting Together

Two single mums get talking at the Messy Church tea, just when we were despairing that it was our worst-attended Messy Church ever. They decide it would be great to create an occasion for single mums generally to get together and Sheila who organises everything to do with families at Swanvale Halt church agrees to book the church hall and be there as a responsible person. At 5.15 on evening last week they turned up and began. Sally our Pastoral Assistant baked a cake: it was huge but all disappeared. There were eight young women and ten children. One bought board games and three women sat with a Scrabble board for two hours. 'I didn't have to do anything apart from buy some food' said Sheila. Something to serve a group of people we don't normally reach, spontaneously arising out of our contacts: it's the kind of thing I've waited fourteen years to see happen. 

You Can Do Without That Kind of Excitement

The church was full for the main service on Sunday for a baptism, which is an infrequent event as most of ours happen separately. But this was the baby daughter of Allie our Treasurer, a birth from within the congregation and thus a great delight. Lots of children came with their families and with all dad Danny's friends from the Swanvale Halt Rugby Club.

So that was exciting. Forest Church should have been a complete contrast, quiet and contemplative. Usually Allie, her mother and sister, would have been among the attenders, but obviously they had other things to do and so we were seven human souls and one dog making our way into the woods where we'd begun our Forest Church explorations in the summer of last year. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't quite as boggy as when I'd done my usual recce on Saturday afternoon. We had read from Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora about the folklore and properties of the willow tree (did you know that aspirin was developed from a chemical isolated from willow bark?) as well as the Bible, and sung a slightly eccentric hymn, and were just getting into a time of prayer when Derek, an elderly gent who lives not far away from the woods, keeled over and fell on the ground. That rather put an end to contemplation. It seemed like a transitory faint, and guided by a paramedic over the phone we got Derek out, and into the only car close at hand belonging to Jean the sacristan. Another congregation member accompanied them, and stayed at the hospital until Derek's son arrived. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but unsurprisingly the doctors kept him in overnight much to his chagrin. 

As we'd made our way along the path through the woods, I'd glanced aloft at the sunlight glinting through the canopy of trees. When we stopped and took in our surroundings I encouraged us to look up as well. I've an uncomfortable feeling that Derek looked up a bit too long.

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Radio Vicaring

It may be - I forget - that the Reverend Alan Franks has been vicar of St Stephen's, Ambridge (and its linked parishes which The Archers refers to but never covers, for even longer than I've been at Swanvale Halt. This would be unusual but it fits with the way the Church of England in the show works. The local diocesan, the Bishop of Felpersham, appears so occasionally that it took a while for the writers to realise it was stretching credulity for the Rt Rev Cyril Hood to occupy the position for nearly 30 years as they dragged the same actor, Peter Howell, back in to the studio every time they needed episcopal input. Bishop Cyril would have been about 90 by the time he retired, and that's even older than Eric Kemp.

A few days ago Revd Franks was confronted with the appalling Rob Titchener asking to be baptised. Even though Mrs Vicarage Usha saw this instantly as one of Rob's mind-games, one can understand Alan (who's only spoken to the wretched man a couple of times) feeling obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even he could see the ructions that baptising Rob might cause among the other members of his flock who he had deceived and harmed, yet it took his wife to remind him that he had a responsibility to protect them. To any of us who might imagine ourselves in a similar position the answer was blindingly obvious: to get a neighbouring colleague to deal with the matter. In reality people move around between parishes for baptisms all the time because they have pre-existing links with this or that church (or occasionally because a church makes demands on the families of baptizands that are simply impractical, and are sometimes designed to be). We all accept this happens and the polite thing is to inform the home parish when it does; it's no big deal. But Revd Franks tied himself up in emotional knots before calling the Bishop who told him to do what anyone else would already have decided days ago.

Alan Franks, it seems to me, invariably gives the impression of being hunted around his parish and always wanting to be somewhere other than where he is, and talking to anyone other than the person in front of him. It was understandable that he didn't want to speak to the dreadful Titchener, his brother, or anyone else who wanted to refer to the matter, but unless he's beaming pacifically at people leaving the church on a Sunday morning Alan never seems to want to talk to anyone. While all this was going on he got into a conversation with another character about ghosts which he clearly couldn't wait to escape from. This is odd because he seems able to come up with quite concise and convincing answers to questions in a far more ready manner than I ever can. A parish priest, it's true, spends a certain amount of time talking to people they'd rather not, but most of us I think learn quite quickly never, ever to let our impatience show on the surface because anyone other than the thickest-skinned souls will be very hurt by it. Perhaps the Vicar of Ambridge just isn't having much fun and needs to move on. I wonder when his next Ministerial Review is? Mine's next month.

Prayer and Fasting, Sort Of

'We call upon the people of our congregations and all those of goodwill around the world to observe a Day of Prayer and Fasting' ran the letter from the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, issued last Friday. More prayer can never be a bad thing, though only having got back to work (and found out about the letter) on Monday there wasn't time for me to organise anything collective. I put the appeal on the church LiberFaciorum page and prepared to keep the day in some way myself. 

You might ask what this actually means in practice. What it probably ought to mean is literally an entire day devoted to prayer about a particular matter, and a fast means abstinence from anything with any calorific value at least until the evening when, liturgically, the day is over. But I faced a number of problems. The first was that I'd come back from leave with a cold which first made itself known on Saturday/Sunday night: two covid tests have suggested it isn't that, in so far as you can rely on these things, but I do feel grotty, and prayer and fasting when you are ill are a particular challenge. The second issue was the number of other things I had to do - the usual midweek mass in the morning, a range of jobs mainly based on the computer, and a session at the Air Cadets in the evening. Prayer would have to fit around those.

So my fast was an etiolated observance which permitted some cups of black tea and dry bread until dinner-time, and prayer consisted of a couple of short interludes through the day when I laid the terrible current events in the Holy Land before the Lord. I got back from the Squadron where I discussed the deceptions and subterfuges of war to the news of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza, and not just a hospital but a hospital run by the Anglican Church. It seemed a sort of demonic mockery of any miserable prayers I'd been able to offer. 

Relief Arrives

I return from my leave to find not the customary disasters or pastoral nightmares, but something going right: the gents' toilets are finished. Positively hotel-standard, these are. Originally, we thought the work that needed doing - replacing a nasty lino floor and refixing a wall of false tiles - would be a simple job taking a week or two that we could probably do in-house. Instead it's taken a year and cost £15000. In the course of it we discovered that the mysterious damp which had made the floor so nasty in the first place and which we've been investigating for years was down to a boxed-in pipe feeding the radiator that had never been properly soldered. Of such things, I find myself repeating ruefully, is the Kingdom made.

Dover - a Long View

The last holiday post this time comes from a trip to Dover with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid, Ms DarkSeville and Madam GreenWitch. The town did not delay us long and instead we spent the entire day in the castle. I'd been there 35 years ago or more but had forgotten the sheer size of the place - the keep, or Great Tower as they call it there, is a match for several of the castles I visited in Wales on its own. I wasn't sold on the gaudy pseudo-medieval decor in the castle, but conceded that without them it would be a succession of big bare rooms. The thing that struck us all was how close France seemed to be: on this beautifully clear day the Port of Calais and the features of the cliffs were easy to see. I would have guessed they were ten miles away at best, rather than the twenty-odd they are. On the tour of the World War Two command centre tunnels we'd seen a blown-up photo of Goering and a row of Nazi colleagues gazing across the Channel in 1941, and it was easy enough to imagine them regarding us from the other side right now. A kestrel hovered over the ramparts to welcome us, while back at Waterloo waiting for my train I watched a pigeon savage a couple of chips, chopping them into bits and improbably gobbling the lot before trotting off with what can only be described as self-satisfaction.

Hastings - Wells and Others

Until yesterday I'd never been to Hastings, but decided to go at least partly because of the number of interesting wells of different kinds the town has, and have therefore jokingly referred to it as 'the Other Glastonbury'. Not that it shares the Somerset town's hippie/New Age side: its alternative scene is more punk if anything, a bit like Brighton just along the way. The town centre falls into two parts - the 19th-century resort to the west of the Castle, and the old town to its east, which is surprisingly old and picturesque.

My first stop wasn't a well but the Town Museum, on top of the hill in a castellated folly-house. It's free to go in, imaginatively laid-out and full of surprising things. I hadn't expected the ethnology displays, derived from various collectors not all of whom were Victorian adventurers, but whose bits and pieces, the museum is keen to stress, were acquired by means as ethical as they could be given the time. Mods and Rockers appear in the history galleries as do bathing costumes, fishing gear, and scary puppets, culminating in artefacts from the Green Man Festival which friends of mine attend.

Down in the old town, based in the former church of St Nicholas (patron saint of fishermen) is the Fishermen's Museum, mainly one big room with a little annexe, housing a boat, fishing paraphernalia, a wartime Doodlebug dredged from the bay, stuffed animals, and some fantastic photographs from the amazing 1890s archive of George Wood. Although the church no longer functions as such, children can still be baptised in the font (there were three last year). The Winkle Club is a Hastings charitable institution, providing the context for the suit of silver-painted winkle shells worn by 'Slugger Hoad the Winkle King'. I'm not making this up, I promise. 

I found the wells generally quite hard to find: all the online descriptions are a bit unhelpful. The Roman Bath lies in Summerfield Woods (cross the grass next to the Leisure Centre, into the woods, go left down a flight of log steps and then left again past the pools and you should find it). It's a folly that seems to have been the work of Wastel Brisco of Bohemia House nearby: there were several Wastel Briscos, surprising though that may seem, and the family derived at least part of its money from Jamaican slave plantations. The Roman Bath was once a much more extensive structure, as this full account shows, and is a bit run-down at the moment with its nasty municipal gratings. I gave it a bit of a tidy up. 

In Alexandra Park there are two mineral springs. They lie right in the north-western half of the park: follow the path past the miniature railway, keep the stream on your right and you will find them, but I wouldn't have without directions from one of the Rangers. Dr McCabe's Well is the earlier - Peter McCabe, so a plaque tells us, was an Irish doctor who became Mayor of Hastings in the 1830s and was 'a committed campaigner for clean water' - and the other Chalybeate Spring was incorporated into the park in 1880 though it was presumably identified earlier. These are both separate from St Andrew's Spa, which lay in the corner between St Helen's Road and St Helen's Park Road to the north. 

Along Rock-a-Nore in the old town lies East Well. This impressive temple-like building was also built by Dr McCabe: the museum has a painting of people drawing water from it and George Wood took a photo of children around it in the 1890s though I suspect it's a bit posed! You can still take perfectly safe water from it and I presume there is a spring that feeds the well structure. Along the seafront is a modern Wishing Well - the Rotarians manage these things in several places. Finally, next to Holy Trinity Church is the very grand if disintegrating Waldegrave Fountain, a big Gothic structure opened as a memorial to the philanthropist Countess Sarah Waldegrave in 1861, and designed by SS Teulon. 

The hardest well to find was what may be the area's original holy well, St Helen's Well about a mile and a half north of the town centre at Ore. I spent an hour wandering the roads and woods west of the ruins of the old St Helen's Church being misdirected by well-meaning locals and misinterpreting three maps before I got accurate directions. What I should have done was walk down the misleadingly-named St Helen's Park Road (it's a track) south off The Ridge, branch off left into Dunclatha Road (another dirt track at this point), and after a few yards look out for little paths leading to the left over a stream and uphill, and that's where the Well is. It's a pair of stone-lined basins, one small, one large, emptying into a pool. It's a nice spot, and its restoration in 2011 was a journey of self-discovery for one soul, though there's a slight question mark over it as it only seems to be named in Graham Jones's 1986 Landscape History paper, 'Holy Wells and the Cult of St Helen'. I also missed by yards what some local people call 'the Monk's Well', which is probably what's marked on the 1878 OS map as a 'drinking fountain', fed by the same spring. 

Finally I drove out east to the Hastings Country Park to find the Dripping Well. This turned out to be comparatively straightforward! You simply follow a marked footpath running south opposite the car park, turn right and then left, and in the little wooded glen at the bottom you'll find it, a rock in a dell with water, as the name suggests, dripping down into a shallow pool from above. It was a popular 19th-century tourist spot and there are lots of photos and prints to see online: when I worked at the Priest's House in Wimborne there was one from 1889 in a random box of stereoscope slides, and on my wall I have a much earlier print. 

But what is perhaps, just for historical reasons, the most interesting holy well in Hastings lies at the moment inaccessible in the crypt of the former church of St Mary-in-the-Castle, whose temple-like portico looms incongruously above the seafront. This is one of those bizarre Georgian churches built in the round rather than with a traditional east-west orientation, and it had a font which tapped spring water coming out of the cliff face. Even more anomalously in terms of Anglican Church history, in 1929 St Mary's created a tiled baptismal pool utilising the same spring water, and at some point the rock basin of the spring itself became a holy well complete with Biblical verses, a cup for drinking the water, and a box for donations. The church became an arts centre, but Hastings Council pulled the funding last year, and until that gets sorted, the spring will remain unseen. 

Until visiting the Museum I'd forgotten that Aleister Crowley used to live in Hastings. He allegedly said that you had to carry a hagstone if you wanted to leave the town safely, so it was just as well I found one on the beach. 

Aquae Avaloniae

Among those of us who discuss these things, Glastonbury's wells have been a topic of conversation over recent months. The Slipper Well and the Blue Spring have been mentioned, apparently new names for sites we knew about, while St Edmund's Well has been revealed to anyone who doesn't live locally as a really rather important site. But while the esoteric history of Glastonbury has been written about ad infinitum nobody has put all the details of the wells in one place. I thought this might be another little project to work on, so yesterday on my way back from Dorset I diverted north to what turned out to be a misty marshland town, the weather only turning sunny several hours after it had been supposed to.

The journey had been wearying enough to make me fall desperately into the café at the Rural Life Museum as soon as I arrived and only walk around afterwards. The Museum occupies the site of Abbey Farm and provides as much of a prosaic contrast as you could imagine with the alternative life of modern Glastonbury. I say 'prosaic', but that's hardly an appropriate word for the mighty medieval Tithe Barn which the farm inherited from the dissolved Abbey. I found the great 18th-century cider press the most charismatic object in the collection. 

In the wall around the Museum site is the first well. This tiny alcove was, as a newspaper sketch from 1888 reveals, once much taller and was probably lowered when the farm closed and the wall was rebuilt. I remember seeing it years ago - in fact, I remember running across the road from my parents' car in the pouring rain to look at it, but paying it little attention because it didn't seem to have a name or any traditions associated with it. In fact that 1888 newspaper article calls it 'The Holy Well' - but not the Slipper Well, the name it seems to have now. It's said to be where pilgrims washed their feet before entering the Abbey precincts. That sounds to me like an idea borrowed from Walsingham, where pilgrims take off their shoes at the Slipper Chapel to walk the last mile to the shrine. 

What of the Blue Spring? That's another relatively recent way of describing Bride's or St Brigid's Well at Beckery to the west of the town, a very important site which may very well represent the oldest Christian monastic settlement in Britain. There's nothing there now, and even the little stone marking the 'traditional site' of the well is hard to find, as my visit demonstrated, and may have been moved from where it used to stand which means we ought perhaps to have another stone marking the traditional location of the marker stone ... The 'Blue Spring' name comes from the complicated story about a blue medieval glass bowl which I'm not going to go into here. I imagine the whole area looks a bit more welcoming in the sunshine!

Back in the town, I called in at the Magdalene Almshouses, a place I'd never visited before, because of a reference someone made to another sacred spring there that pours out of a spout onto the road - indeed it does, though I'm not sure anyone identified it as a holy well until very recently. But the Almshouses are a deeply moving site, a row of tiny one-room 15th-century cells whose last resident died in 1958, and a quiet chapel. I spotted the icons of SS Margaret and Mary Magdalene and recognised the work of John Coleman from his images of the Dorset well-saints Whyte and Edwold. 'Ikon John' was the name the Almshouse volunteers recalled: he had a workshop in one of the cells and talked to visitors about icon-painting and the spirituality behind it.

From there I toiled up the hill, over a stile, and along an overgrown path to St Edmund's Well. This is a site I've known about for years, and in fact have argued that it was the original holy well of Glastonbury, but until about six months ago assumed was lost - until people began to post about it on LiberFaciorum, revealing a well which can hold its own with the best of Cornwall or Ireland, a well-house of some antiquity which is only now coming to anything more than strictly local attention. Additionally, I'd presumed a group of 'Holywell' names north of the Tor referred to St Edmund's Well, but that's not what they say at Holywell Farm, pointing to a spring down the hill as the eponymous Holy Well; I'm not convinced I found the right site, but I'm glad to know it's there.

After that it was a relief to be going downhill to the more famous Glastonbury springs. I've been to Chalice Well plenty of times but it's always pleasing to see people using the site as a tool for their own spiritual lives, drinking the water, wading in it, leaving offerings at the well-head, or sitting in meditative silence ...

... though silence, as such, was a rare commodity across the road at the White Spring, which I'd never visited before. Chalice Well was founded by a group of souls, including Dion Fortune, for instance, who held Christianity and paganism in balance: it's reticent and well-mannered. At White Spring the alternative is much more up-front: people mill about outside playing drums and parting to let vehicles up the road when they need to pass. In the 1870s the town authorities built a waterworks to tap the calcium-rich springs here, but the minerals clogged up the pipes and eventually forced a rethink, leaving behind a building which over the last 20 years has been turned into what anyone can recognise is a deeply powerful water-shrine with an eclectic spirituality. I found entering its dark vaulted space, lit with candles, a bit challenging at first as waves of discordant sound washed over me, and I had to avert my eyes from the people stripping to bathe in the chilly waters of the rear plunge pool! (This is partly why photographs are ruled out at the White Spring). I had a good conversation with Annwyn Avalon who was welcoming visitors to the Spring and who has relocated from the USA, summoned by the call of the Glastonbury springs. This is, of course, not a path I follow, but I know many friends who do, so I lit a candle for them at the Peace Shrine which seemed from its icons of angels to be the most Christian bit, and quietly recited the Magnificat. 

(What was I doing by that? I don't see it as 'reclaiming the space', any more than a pagan coming into my church and offering a prayer to the Goddess alters the nature of that location. Some Christians might argue it did, that some act of counter-reclamation or cleansing might be in order; but the God I believe in doesn't need my defence or anyone else's. He's already in control and there is no power in earth or heaven that can depose him. We can relax). 

Ms Avalon pointed me back into the town for one last visit - the fountain outside the Methodist Church which, so it's said, was built to tap three springs which rise beneath the church itself. Its neo-Norman arch recalls the one well I didn't visit yesterday, St Joseph's Well in the Abbey (I wasn't going to pay another entrance fee just to photograph something I took a snap of 3 years ago). Look at that carved hand pointing towards the Tor! I didn't climb up there, either, and I was very glad to make it back to the car after a long day chasing wells.