Wells - Staffs & Salop

While I don't want to try people's patience with all the holy wells I saw while away, there were some intriguing ones, so here are a couple. Nun's Well at Cannock Wood lies at the end of a footpath running west from Hayfield Hill. It's been photographed before, but I went straight past the old oak tree growing above it and ended up crossing a stile and wandering round some woodland before realising what I'd done and retracing my steps. The tree, on its own as the ground drops away to the south, looks different from all the online images (until now!) as part of it has collapsed and the whole thing is now isolated within a corded enclosure which you can just about cross to examine the well more closely. The basic structure is natural stone topped with a now very distorted brick arch which must be of some antiquity to have been covered by the tree. It appears on the 1884 O.S. map and may owe its name to a 12th-century land grant as there was no nunnery anywhere nearby.

Lady Well, Wombourne is a similar sort of site though harder to find. There's a steep path leading east next to 84 Orton Lane, and before it turns parallel with the field boundary at the top a small path partly obstructed by a fallen tree follows off to the right. The well is down a steep bank which would be very treacherous in wet weather, beneath the only yew tree in the vicinity which is the best way of finding it. Again, the basic structure is the natural stone, in this case a great limestone outcrop which has been added to by a couple of low brick walls to keep the mud out of the water (it was dry when I saw it, though fairly recent visitors have found it full and in fact water running down the rock into the basin). It has been claimed as a hermit's well: just above it you can see a few walls belonging to stone cottages which used to stand on this steep hillside, though those were clearly much later than the age of hermits.

Lastly I was keen to see St Catherine's Well, Eccleshall, which I only knew about from Andy Norfolk's holy well maps. This is a neat sandstone well-house with a pyramidal roof in a different stone, and may be related to the creation of the landscape gardens of Sugnall Hall in the mid-1700s or the time the Hall was rebuilt in 1777: either way, the name of the saint doesn't seem clearly connected to anything local. There is a path leading to the well through a nice wooden door in the wall on the eastern side of Sugnall Hill, and you can see very recent signage pointing the site out (laminated notices stapled to trees don't last that long), but a fall of tree branches has made it impossible to inspect the well closely. The water still runs but now past the well house rather than into it.