St Aidan's Well, Bamburgh

Last year, some might recall, I spent my Autumn holiday in the Scottish borders and venturing into Northumberland. As usual, I saw a number of holy wells, but I now discover that I encountered one more than I thought I had. This public watering-place on the edge of the green in Bamburgh village caught my eye as it is so bizarre, the Gothic cage perched on a plinth rather smaller than itself, but I hadn't realised that it is St Aidan's Well, sharing a dedication with the ancient church not far away. 

Or so we are told. The source is a series of articles I've never seen in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle, penned by the prolific hunter of wells and other things, Canon PBG Binnall, and Miss MH Dodds, who believed that the 14th-century name Edynwell obscured a reference to the local saint. I'm far from convinced. That aside, this weird structure appears to have been cobbled together from whatever fragments happened to be lying around when Bamburgh decided it needed a new public fountain: certainly no one element looks as though it really belongs with any other. I imagine the crucial date to uncover would be that of the lion's head spout, as that would probably be the occasion when the whole thing was built; either that, or there was an earlier structure which had fallen into ruin and the spout marks its restoration. I wouldn't like to say anything more definite without going back and looking at it again. Sometimes, apparently, the trough gets filled not with water, but with flowers. 

I think I could be forgiven for not identifying this as a holy well in the absence of any other signifiers. At the very least, it's not quite like anything elsewhere!