St Michael's Well, Sopley - or Not

Some time in the summer of 1986, I was driving with my family along the B3347 between Christchurch and Ringwood as we passed through the village of Sopley. As we negotiated a tight left bend over a little bridge next to the Woolpack Inn, I spotted an arch over an alcove in a redbrick wall beside a gateway on the right-hand side of the road. We stopped, and I found what seemed to be a holy well. This was only a year after visiting my very first holy well, St Trillo's Well at Rhos-on-Sea in north Wales, and I was full of excitement to find more. There was a metal spout on the back wall of the well in the shape, as I later described it, of 'some fabulous animal' (my mind, I think, going back to David Attenborough's TV series of that name in 1975). I even dared to taste the water which I thought was chalybeate, and I certainly wouldn't risk that now. 

This week I found myself back on that road again, stopped, and took a picture of the well as the only one I had was very poor. The water, bright green with pondweed, completely submerged the Fabulous Animal up to the tips of its iron ears. There was as much mud and leaf-mulch in the basin as water, and the image on the back of Christ (presumably) offering a jar to a kneeling figure, flanked by Alpha and Omega signs, seems less distinct than when I first saw it forty years ago. Forty years! Well, 39. 

I find that there's quite a lot online about this well now, which there definitely wasn't in 1986. In fact I think I am responsible for most of it. I wrote up my visit, among a set of similarly slightly dubious wells, in the old holy wells magazine, Source, then run by Mark Valentine. I called it 'St Michael's Well', because Sopley's ancient church is dedicated to St Michael and I had the belief in those days that once upon a time every holy well would have shared a dedication with its parish church, as they appeared to in Ireland. Now, of course, I know that this is not the case and the history of holy wells is complex and fascinatingly multifarious. But I find that everyone refers to this site as 'St Michael's Well'. Members of the New Forest Wells and Springs group on LiberFaciorum organised cleaning the well out in 2024, following an earlier tidy-up in 2008; the Parish Council also knows the site under this name that I entirely made up. The strange spout is now almost universally described as a dragon which makes perfect sense for a holy well dedicated to St Michael. The well's real history is obscure. It sits opposite a Picturesque Gothic lodge built between 1870 and 1896 to judge by the Ordnance Survey, and its wall seems designed to look like a ruin; the Kemp-Welch family of Poole owned the big house, Sopley Park, at that time, though what led either John Kemp-Welch the Schweppes magnate or his son (also John) to build this remarkable structure is anyone's guess. The pipes that convey the water from a spring in the park seem to have collapsed, and what fills the well now is probably just rain run-off. 

Provided everyone understands (as I've tried to ensure) that the name of the well is of no great antiquity, I see no problem with its new general title. Oddly at Bisterne nearby there is a story of a 'real' dragon that once menaced the neighbourhood, and on the widespread assumption that dragon tales encode struggles between Christianity and paganism people have told me this fits in rather well with 'St Michael's Well'. Who knows? Did I mysteriously understand more than I knew back in 1986? Remember St Catherine's Well at Guildford, another wild guess that turned out to be entirely true!

Sham Rock

Years and years ago I may have railed about the nonsense pedalled by pagans (and some Christians) about Easter, but I hadn't any idea that St Patrick's Day was the subject of similar balderdash until a friend of mine posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday. I should resist going down these kind of rabbit holes, but here's the original statement, with my own responses interposed.

"St Patrick's Day - a very very bizarre celebration indeed. A British and Roman priest

That’s the last accurate statement in the passage.

"who attempted to annihilate the Druids,

There’s no evidence of anything approaching this. All the evidence (as opposed to later mythologising) suggests that Patrick’s mission was relatively limited. His Confessio makes it clear that he was highly dependent on the goodwill of the powerful in Irish society, and instead (very, very rarely among Christian missionaries) he says ‘towards the pagan people too among whom I live, I have lived in good faith, and will continue to do so. God knows that I have not been devious with even one of them, nor do I think of doing so, for the sake of God and his church. I would not want to arouse persecution of them and of all of us’.

"conducted exorcisms to banish the great Irish faery deity Ainé, who told lies about the faery,

The only information we have about pre-Christian Irish deities come from later sources produced within a Christian context, such as the Book of Invasions. But Ainé doesn’t appear there: she occurs in the 11th-century The Fitness of Names. There, she isn’t treated as a goddess, and isn’t a supernatural personality, just a powerful woman. In Limerick folklore, she becomes ‘an old woman who was in with the Good People’, not ‘Queen of the Fairies’ as old-style mythologists such as Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend (1919) claimed, or the ‘goddess of summer, wealth, and sovereignty’ as she is now described. There is nothing that links St Patrick with any supposed worship of Aine and his own writings do not mention her.

"who claimed he threw Pagan women who would not convert into the ocean

He doesn’t. We have all the words Patrick wrote about himself in his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and that story isn’t in them.

"and they became mermaids,

This statement sounds like it might have come from later hagiography of Patrick, but it seems to be derived from a garbled amalgam of folk stories. I tried to chase it down. In Legends and Superstitions of the Sea (1885), FS Bassett refers to a legend of people who dwelt under the sea (not strictly mermaids) in Wales because their ancestors had refused to believe St Patrick and so had sunk beneath the water, but that’s the closest I can get to any old source for this story. It’s not Irish, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the historical Patrick. I came across references to ‘old women being thrown into the sea on St Patrick’s Day and becoming mermaids’, but they’re all from modern sources.

"who "drove out the snakes" (the Pagan ways)

Indeed an older generation of writers accounted for this legend, which doesn’t date any earlier than the 11th century, by claiming it referred to Patrick exterminating paganism, and therefore by extension pagans themselves. You come across more elaborate versions such as the claims that the Druids had snake tattoos, or revered snakes because they represented the circle of life (that seems especially odd, as snakes don’t naturally curl into circles, and the Druids couldn't have revered animals that weren't around in the first place). There is no evidence for any of it. Today most commentators accept that it’s a ‘just-so’ story concocted to explain the fact that Ireland has no snakes, in the same way that by the 6th century there was a legend circulating that St Hilary had driven the snakes from the island of Gallinara in Italy. The snakes in the story aren’t druids, or even paganism more generally: they’re just snakes.

"and attempted to turn the great bright god Lugh into Lugh-chromain (Little stooping Lugh)

Apart from Lugh being a genuine deity who appears in the Book of Invasions and versions of whom are attested in Britain and Gaul, similar remarks apply to him as to Ainé. There’s no record of St Patrick having any dealings relating to him, and there’s no evidence that the holy mountain eventually called Croagh Patrick was a sanctuary of Lugh.

 "which would become "lephrecaun".

Etymologists now derive leprechaun from the pagan Roman feast of the Lupercalia, so this name for Irish fairy people dates from well into the Christian era of monkish writers who knew what Lupercalia was. It’s nothing to do with Lugh.

"I adore the Irish. I revere Ireland. I have that old blood singing within my veins. But this day is a day to celebrate the survival of the Old Ways despite what this "Saint" represented and the cruel action he took. Today, I wear the green, for the fae, for the Old Ways, for the shining ones and the deep love of the land. Blessings to you all my friends. A blessing on the survival of the old ways, and of the Truth emerging from the distortions of history."

One despairs at people's willingness to take garbled misunderstandings, utterly ahistorical garbage, and other guesses and falsehoods, which could all be corrected with a modicum of curiosity, and call them 'Truth'. At least thoughtful pagans aren't taken in.

The Night Watch

The usual problem the Halloween lanterns face is that gusty breezes will blow them out, but the night was relatively wind-free around Swanvale Halt. However it was wet, and so the flickering flames faced the greater danger of being extinguished that way. After toasting the dead in the churchyard as usual, I left this little fellow to do his work against the church wall under the protecting arm of a headstone cross, so we will see how long his light lasted.

Groups of little witches and other horrors made their way up and down the hill between about 6 and 7pm, but I only had two children and their parents come to visit me slightly later, when I thought everyone had gone home. Up in Leeds, Professor Purplepen had more than twenty in seven groups, while Dr FireFace in Oxford claimed a hundred. That's a lot of chocolate. 

Interestingly I have pagan friends who are starting to rail against the fact that their serious religious festival of Samhain has been commercialised and turned into a camp pumpkin-and-spookfest. They'd like to detach Samhain from Halloween in the same way many Christians would like to separate Halloween from All Hallowtide. I think they're looking through the wrong end of the telescope a bit, but there you go.

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). 

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. 

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Obsession: Radio 4's 'The Witch Farm'

Let’s talk ghosts again!

My dad used to describe the frustrations of being a car mechanic. Customers would bring their cars to the garage and report ‘a funny noise’ which might be difficult to define or locate. When does this noise happen? the mechanics would ask. The customer might say that it happened under such-and-such circumstances, but not all the time. The mechanics would sigh and do their best. Sometimes they would begin work on one problem, only to discover something completely different. If this is how difficult it is to diagnose an issue concerning a lump of steel, plastic and glass with an internal combustion engine in it, an entirely material business, how hard must it be to deal with non-physical stuff you can’t test or measure, matter that’s affected by psychology, history, culture, and circumstances to unknown degrees?

As we noted in respect to Danny Robins’s previous dramatised paranormal investigation radio series, The Battersea Poltergeist, this problem is much to the fore in the one which has just finished on Radio 4, The Witch Farm. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the unfortunate Rich family experienced a bewildering variety of terrifying manifestations at an old house not far from Brecon called Heol Fanog. Over the years they engaged an equally wide range of specialists to find out why these things were happening and to stop them, beginning with the Anglican clergy at Brecon Cathedral who sprayed holy water about to no effect at all; a strange psychic with the unlikely name of Larry Harry who identified witches and other presences at the heart of the problem; a dowser who told them it was all about ley lines gone bad; a Baptist minister who spent two years, on and off, trying to drive demons out of the house; and finally ghosthunter Eddie Burks whose ministrations to the unhappy spirits he described at Heol Fanog seemed to bring positive results that sadly proved only temporary. Eventually the Riches had to leave, the family fell apart, and poor Bill Rich essentially drank himself to death.

Although I’d never heard of it before, this is far from the first time that the story of Heol Fanog has been told, but we are still no nearer a clear explanation. The various rationales, natural or paranormal, for the events at the house are not necessarily mutually exclusive; but that means that it’s hard to exclude any of them and reach a clear judgement about what went on. There’s nothing secure to go on, and in the show Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow roll their sceptic-versus-believer double act across the ambiguity without resolution. The one absolutely demonstrable, material oddity among all the Heol Fanog phenomena is the abnormally high electricity bills the Riches found themselves paying not long after moving in: that should be a plain matter to investigate, but the electricity company that operated then no longer exists, the question is never really gone into, and, while no natural explanation is offered, neither is it clear why these entities should cause so much electrical disturbance when so many others don’t.

In my very, very limited experience of this area of work the first question one asks oneself is what might be the centre of the event. Some phenomena are definitely place-based; most ghosts, whatever one thinks ghosts are, focus on a particular location and never manifest anywhere else. Many of them play out the same actions and motions whenever they appear, like recordings. Other phenomena are person-based, and what we tend to call poltergeists seem to be of this sort, capable of manifesting in different places a specific individual happens to be. So, when trying to find out what might be going on in any stated case, you would ask the witnesses whether anything of the kind had ever happened to them before, in another setting. When The Witch Farm began, this was the very first question I wanted answered; whatever may have happened to the Riches, Heol Fanog appears to be quiet now and at one point in the drama Liz Rich is told that the previous tenant never experienced anything at all (though visitors to the house claimed to have done). In fact, Heol Fanog is quiet to the point that when Danny Robins goes to visit the location with a dowser he rather implies that they have to creep around the perimeter of the property and avoid annoying the current residents: he doesn’t actually state ‘we contacted them and they told us to get knotted’, but let’s say they don’t seem to have anything to add to the investigation, as they might if they were being plagued by the paranormal themselves.

Despite Heol Fanog’s apparently complex and disagreeable history, that led me to think right from the start that one of the Rich family was crucial to the whole thing and, by the end of the series, it seems that Bill Rich’s one-time involvement with the occult – he began an initiation into witchcraft with Alex and Maxine Sanders, but backed out before it was complete – was at the centre of the events, whether we understand its effects as supernatural or psychological. But in fact I’m coming to wonder whether there’s a third category of phenomena engendered by a person susceptible to disturbance arriving in potentially disturbed surroundings, and that may be what we have in The Witch Farm.

David Holmwood, the local Baptist minister who the Riches are put onto as a potential solution for their problems, interests me. Mr Holmwood worked in industry and his wife Patricia was a nurse before he concluded that he was being called to the ministry in 1971. He served as a student pastor at Stockwood Free Church in Bristol and then went to Fillebrook Baptist Church in east London before they both worked in Brazil. Mr Holmwood’s next posting I can find was in Romsey in 1988, after which he must have gone to Wales. Then he was at Stoke Row in Buckinghamshire, and his last appointment was with the chaplaincy team at Heathrow Airport in the early 2000s – in fact he was there to witness the effects of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. This all seems unspectacular enough if a bit more varied than the average nonconformist minister's career, but The Witch Farm interviews his successor at Jerusalem Baptist in Pentrebach who states that Mr Holmwood had an extensive ministry of exorcism and dealing with the paranormal, at least while he was there.

Of course I had my head in my hands when the show described him as ‘a local vicar’ (he wasn’t), but Revd Holmwood doesn’t do anything an Anglican clergyperson might not, apart from working as a freelancer: Anglicans operate in teams, bringing doctors and psychologists into play as well as spiritual weaponry, but Mr Holmwood doesn’t have anyone else on board except for an American ex-Satanist called Anita. He drives them all to Heol Fanog and during the journey an owl chucks itself against the windscreen of the car in broad daylight, which is very Hammer House of Horror. Curiously he appears – from the drama, anyway – to identify Bill Rich as the focus of the problem quite quickly, but apparently never draws from him the actual reason why this might be so, instead getting him to burn his spooky paintings as he decides they are the way the Devil ‘gets in’. Even if Mr Holmwood’s techniques are not that different from his Anglican counterparts’, his obsessive persistence seems unusual. Not only does he take months readying himself for his oncoming battle with Satan, if we believe the narrative we’re presented with, he spends about two years hanging around at Heol Fanog, intermittently staying there, praying, reading Scripture, and scaring the Riches even more than they are already, until eventually they’ve had enough of him. Nothing that he does has any effect on what they’re experiencing. Coming from a Christian perspective, these techniques are supposed to be powerful and effective, based as they are in the power of God; if they haven’t achieved anything after repeated application, you ought to question whether your entire analysis of the problem is awry.

However we interpret the story of the Rich family, it strikes me that there’s another tale to be told here, that of a Christian minister sucked in by their own interpretation of a set of events which in fact seem to centre on a disturbed, lonely, and guilt-ridden individual. In that way, Revd David Holmwood – God rest his soul – should probably have had reason to be grateful that he was eventually detached from the obsessive power of Heol Fanog. 

Obligatory Halloween Shot

In fact Halloween night was wet and windy at Swanvale Halt and keeping the lanterns lit was no easy task. By the time I set out for the churchyard for my customary toast to the dead and to leave a lantern to watch over them - for however long or short a time - there wasn't a single glint of a candle from a pumpkin. Nor did I get any visitors so I will have to eat all the chocolate myself. It will take some time.

Halloween is my younger niece's birthday and my sister took her and her friends out trick-or-treating, though at 13 I get the impression she's a little long in the tooth for it as it seems to be primary-school age children who mainly engage in it. Earlier in the day they'd been shopping in Bournemouth and visited the tomb of the Shelleys at St Peter's which seems like an appropriate cultural activity for the day!

Abbotsbury in April

St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury seems different on every visit. The weather is an aspect of that: on this occasion (Bank Holiday Monday) it was bright, but not especially warm. Lots of people were about, and a couple of children stumbled in while I was in the middle of the Office Hymn. As I left I could hear them trying out the famous acoustic: perhaps they wouldn't have, had they not heard me. The other changing aspect is the prayers people leave in the wall niches. There were two little stones decorated with Ukraine hearts, a range of love tokens ('we were engaged here 14.2.2022'), prayers of remembrance, and some heartache: 'I wish I had a child', read one. Although none of the prayers address St Catherine by name at the moment (that has been a trend in the past, but I've not observed it for some time), one either unwittingly or by design picked up on the traditional use of the chapel: 'Dear God/Universe, whatever. Please can I meet my love. I think I'm ready now.'

The Shoe Tree

Until yesterday I had no idea Hornington had a Shoe Tree. It's not much of one, to be fair - it doesn't have a great many shoes - but it seems to have been photographed as long ago as 2017 so how I can have missed it given the number of times I must have gone past it I can't imagine. 

The redoubtable Ms Trollsmiter asked me what on earth Shoe Trees are about, but this absolutely reasonable question is impossible to answer neatly. There are masses of Shoe Trees across the world (here's a list of US ones) and new examples appear all the time; this folklore-and-magic blogger reports on a recent one in Scotland. There is no single reason why people start tossing shoes in trees and other people choose to imitate them, and the reason why the first event happens may not be why it's followed by more. The Hornington tree is near the skate park, as is the one in Basingstoke which began last year, and this one in Soham, so there might be some local significance to that, but popular theories that shoe trees mark rendezvous points for drug sales, gang territory boundaries, or that popular folkloric staple, 'fertility rituals', seem to be mythical. As this US-based writer points out, it's unclear what 'slinging shoes into a tree has to do with sex'.

When I worked in High Wycombe there was a famous Shoe Tree along the main road leading west from Stokenchurch. Here it is, as I photographed it in 2000: 

The tree was right beside a busy main road and very hard to get a clear look at, let alone throw anything in. Several people assured me gypsies were responsible for it, but again nobody could explain what they might have got out of the act of lobbing a shoe, or a pair of shoes, up a tree: gypsies are of course mysterious and secretive figures so you can safely pin any mystery on them. This tree has existed since the 1970s and has moved about: the one I photographed fell a little while later (I have another photo of it somewhere in its recumbent state) and now there's a successor. There has been some outrage that £265,000 was supposedly awarded by a National Lottery grant to 'get to the bottom of the mystery', but this is based on a misunderstood report in the Daily Mail: the grant was actually given to the Chilterns Woodlands Project in 2005 to research, preserve and publicise 'special trees' across the whole Chilterns region, not just this one. 

Ultimately, I suspect, while the specific reasons why some Shoe Trees begin varies from place to place, they carry on because they're fun - a way of leaving your mark on a place. You will carry on knowing your old footwear is there, even if nobody else knows it's yours. As Hunter Stuart sums up a little deflatingly, 'shoe trees exist because people enjoy throwing their shoes into trees' ... !

Wells of Wales

You can barely turn a corner in the Principality without stumbling across, or even into, a holy well, but they can't all be brilliant examples. We will deal very briefly with St John's Well, Tenby, which survives as a plaque in a wall below the garden of a terraced house; Kithen Well near Parkmill, an active but featureless spring in the undergrowth by a footpath; and the Holy Well of Reynoldston, linked to an old waterworks on the west Gower moors, and in need of a bit of care.

But others seen this last week were far more evocative and rewarding. I wasn't even expecting St Teilo's Well at Llandeilo, set in the wall below the church: it leapt out at me, as it were, in so far as a stationary sacred site can, clearly well-looked after and treated in the manner it deserves.

Down a stony, wooded footpath leading to Caswell Bay from the hamlet of Oldway in Bishopston are the ruins of St Peter's Chapel, and St Peter's Well is nearby. Someone cares for it: there are jugs for collecting the water and even, though you can't see them very easily here, goblets for (I imagine) drinking it - not that I would want to risk its murk.

Finally there was Gumfreston, just west of Tenby. No trouble finding this site, though the steep road down to the church tests the mettle of your car if that's how you're getting there. In his beautiful photographic book Living Wells of Wales Phil Cope shows his parents taking part in the Ceremony of the Nails here on Easter Day, when - in lieu of a service in the officially-neglected church building - locals gathered to cast three iron nails into the water of the tripartite Holy Wells, in honour of Christ's Passion and Resurrection. The couple who organised that, and looked after the church, are gone, and the building now bears a sign telling visitors 'This church is closed pending a decision on its future by the Church In Wales'; now, what can that possibly be? Can nobody nearby really be found to open and close it every now and again? Well. Until then, the Holy Wells are more active than the church, flowing and flowing while it succumbs to ivy.

St Illtyd's, Oxwich, just down from where I was staying, in contrast, has regular services, and - according to a folkloric account clearly copied to and fro across the Web - a long-dry well 'in the upper churchyard' into which a ghostly white horse was supposed to have disappeared. I knew nothing about it until I saw a list of things posted in the church porch for children to look out for. I couldn't spot it, so perhaps it only appears for children, but I'd hesitate to send them searching through the steep and brambled churchyard, perched above the water of the bay. 

Christos Anesti!

By now that should not be news, but Dr RedMedea is Greek and so for her Easter has come a bit later than in the Anglican calendar. On her terrace on Sunday afternoon we were introduced to the custom of egg-smashing, which does require some temporary relaxation of social-distancing regulations. The red-dyed hard-boiled Pasch eggs are knocked together and the holder of the smashed egg has to eat it: that was me, on this occasion. You might have thought that Greeks do seem to like smashing things but in fact this custom was once very widespread and still takes place in bits of England even if I had never encountered it before. Dr RedMedea was disappointed with the dyeing of her eggs but they seemed appropriately livid to the rest of us. 

The Menace of the Border

This monstrous being, dominating its region of the border of my garden along the old wall, is a pampas grass. I ought to have known before, as it's common enough, but I I asked my gardener friend Ms Quercus to identify it for me. To call it 'grass' seems inappropriate: no element of it coincides with one's (British) vision of what grass normally is. I don't clearly remember having done anything to this plant since I arrived here more than ten years ago, though I may have moderately restrained its insistent encroachments on the path once. 

So over the last couple of days I've attempted to tackle it as the RHS suggests, removing the dead flowers and 'combing out' the dry leaves. You'd need quite a comb: even the rake isn't really up to it, and I found I needed to employ my favourite garden implement of all time, the billhook. Under the upper layers of fresh green growth were columns of curling, dry, and ultimately, when you got deeper, rotting vegetation well on the way to becoming compost: that needed to be pulled out. That done and the pampas reduced to the bits of it that were actually alive, I cut some of it back. We finished the process with the shrub's appearance much improved, but I didn't get away unscathed: pampas's razor-like leaves are designed to inflict damage on predators, and my interaction with this one resulted in wrists that looked like I'd had a desperate episode of self-harm and a cut on my forehead when a stray leaf had slapped me like a Triffid.

Worryingly, there is an urban legend that the plant used to be installed as a signal that the householders were into swinging. I don't want to imagine which of my predecessors might have thought along those lines, but if they did they would only have had about three sets of neighbours along one side to choose from. 

Last Hurrah

With the aim of lessening the number of services in these straitened times I cheated yesterday and kept the 8am mass at Swanvale Halt church as All Saints and the 10.30 one as All Souls. We had more living souls turn out for the latter than at any time since the first lockdown began in March, in fact more or less equivalent to what we'd been getting before it began (and not leaving much space in the church). I wondered whether people were coming because it might have been their last chance for some time, but we hadn't actually had confirmation that places of worship would be closing, so it may not have been the case. That will be it for some time, though: it's back to the missa solitaria for now.

On Halloween night I tottered down to the church to make my customary toast to the dead. There was a variety of litter around the churchyard which I cleared up. Whoever had left the litter had also discarded (quite neatly) a Silent Pool gin glass, which I was happy to confiscate and convert to good use.