Well Hunting In East Yorks

My trip to the East Riding was not marked by visits to a great variety of wells. The first I managed to get to was the now-dry Well of Our Lady in Scarborough Castle, glimpsed through the fog on a damp and dull morning; and I spent a while scrambling through various hedges and fields to discover the usual sort of damp holes in the ground and featureless ponds such as Knox Well at Reighton and Keld Spring at Grindale. 

Rather prettier are the three well-known wells at Lastingham over the boundary in North Yorkshire, St Chad's, St Cedd's, and St Ovin's, shown below in that order:

They are all dry now - an increasingly frequent fact and one which has a peculiar sadness as it applies to wells - and a lot could be said about their history by someone who wanted to devote some thought to the matter. St Ovin's Well seems to have been an ordinary village water supply given the name of a monk of Lastingham who appears in the writings of the Venerable Bede but who had no cult in the Middle Ages. It looks superficially similar to St Chad's Well but in fact has a different form. Similar remarks could be made about the equally well-known well of St John of Beverley at Harpham which I reckon has been extensively 'restored' at least three times to judge by the look of the thing. 

The best well, though, was St Helen's Well at Goodmanham which I called in on during my journey home. A brisk walk down a footpath led to a site which has clearly been very thoroughly adopted by the local authorities who have landscaped the area around the well, erected steps and a handrail, and put up a rather bright and cheerful information board despite the fact that virtually nothing is known about the history of the site at all. As Jeremy Harte points out in English Holy Wells, it wasn't until the 1920s that the well's earlier name of Sentenny Wells was reinterpreted as 'St Helen's' - although it's hard to see what else can have given rise to the name. Many writers mention the elder tree above the well, and it is speculated that Anglo-Saxon ellern has given rise to wells of St Helen elsewhere - but there's no evidence of that happening at Goodmanham, and how ellern might morph into Sentenny is a debatable matter.

St Helen's Well, having been a bit tumbledown for quite some time, is now very neat and tidy, arguably a bit too much so, but doubtless it will weather down over time. I can't quite work out how much of the original structure - in so far as there was one - has been incorporated in the modern version. Photographs from a mere six years ago seem to show virtually no stonework around the well-head at all, and the stump of the elder tree that lingered above it for some years has finally gone.

However the scale and secluded location of the site make it impressive, and people are clearly responding. The old custom of hanging rags near some wells so that whatever burden, psychological or medical, you bring to the well will slowly fade as the rag rots away, has now melded with the notion of ribbons for remembrance or commemoration and one of the trees at the bottom of St Helen's Well steps has a dazzling polychrome variety of ribbons. These are mainly polyester rather than cloth, and aren't going to go anywhere anytime soon. You can glimpse the odd CD and trinket; and I noticed that one visitor, apparently, has been on the Race For Life several years running and left her medals here, hanging together on one of the branches.