What Were the Well-Chapels?

The first day of my break on Monday was significantly spent reading about early Christian baptisteries! Unable to do much work on the history of Anglo-catholicism in Surrey (though I have in fact able to visit a couple of churches this week) and rather itching for an alternative project I was thinking about some aspects of the story of holy wells in Dorset, which led me in the direction of well-chapels in Cornwall and elsewhere and why those very distinctive buildings were so different from what we find in ‘English’ England. Going along my bookshelf I realised I’d completely forgotten about Ian Thompson’s short 2008 work Early Hermit Sites and Well Chapels, which covers this territory, and that sent me off on a trajectory which eventually included the Burghal Hidage and the early history of Dorchester, and the letters of Cassiodorus!

Ian Thompson’s argument is alluded to in the earlier book he wrote with his wife Frances, The Water of Life: Springs and wells of mainland Britain (2004), but the booklet elaborates it fully. What he defines as well-chapels, buildings deliberately constructed to contain holy springs and channels of water, are few in number (8 definite and ten probable sites), limited in geographical spread (to Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and areas of England subject to Celtic influence), and mysterious in purpose. Noting that no explanation seems to suffice for all the features of these buildings, he ends up arguing that their true origin lies in sacred and symbolic geography – that well-chapels in this narrow sense are attempts to express the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the ideal Temple. In chapter 47 of his prophecy, Ezekiel is shown by his angel guide the Temple in the renewed Jerusalem, through which a river flows, south of the altar, and eventually entering the Dead Sea, making it into fresh water teeming with fish. Building on a reference to prayers being said for a good fishing catch at the weir associated with St Trillo’s Chapel in north Wales, Mr Thompson speculates that this was also part of the purpose of the chapels – to bless and render more fruitful the rivers into which their waters flow.

This ingenious case is one I find hard to support. Christian churches don’t replicate the Temple: the whole point of Christianity is that the Temple has been replaced by the one who it existed to foreshadow, namely Jesus of Nazareth. In a later vision than Ezekiel’s, that of St John the Divine in the Revelation (which Mr Thompson also cites) the heavenly Jerusalem, the image of the new creation, has no Temple, because God is immediately present there; the ‘river of life as bright as crystal’ flows through its streets, and that may well have some relevance to the architecture of these structures but not necessarily to the details of their orientation. Mr Thompson has to explain the variations in the chapels’ arrangements by different interpretations of Ezekiel, rather than what seems to me the obvious conclusion that the explanation lies elsewhere completely.

These buildings have traditionally, if imprecisely, been described as ‘baptisteries’, and I still think that is what they are: remnants of forms of evangelisation in these parts of the British Isles which relied on individuals – the ‘Cornish Saints’ who are often no more than names – setting up informal worship centres which included a farmstead and a place to baptise converts, developing in many cases to a proper chapel where mass could be said; some became parish churches, some dwindled into overdeveloped well-houses, and some fell to ruin. Whether the water runs through them, adjoins them, or is at some distance, doesn’t seem very important.

Cornwall may have been part of the Empire, but Romanitas meant little west of the Tamar, and not much on that side of the Severn either. Whereas in the rest of the Roman world villas and houses, from Chedworth in Gloucestershire to Dura Europos in Syria, formed the infrastructure for Roman Christianity, in which baptismal pools were either adapted from baths or nymphaea or constructed anew, there wasn’t much of that available in Cornwall. Purpose-built baptisteries of course were grander affairs; in about 313 the Emperor Constantine gave the residence of his wife Fausta’s family, the Laterani, to Pope Miltiades, and just over a century later Pope Sergius built the Lateran Baptistery there, utilising the spring which used to supply the family palace. Then there’s the baptistery associated with the gigantic basilican church at Lechaion in Greece; I can’t see from any of the reports where its water came from, but while you might have filled the tank at the Dura Europos church by hand, you wouldn’t have wanted to do that at Lechaion: it would have taken half a day, and there must have been a natural source. Our tiny Cornish buildings are the remote cousins of these huge structures.

But well-chapels in other parts of ‘England’ aren’t. Different settlement patterns and a more centralised model of secular authority under the kings of Wessex led to entirely separate models of ecclesiastical development. We can guess that a lot of Cornish chapels (most of which are lost) predated their parish churches, while in England east of the Tamar they are almost always later. That means that chapels linked to springs at Spreacombe in Devon or Littlebourne in Kent have an entirely different origin: manorial, in those instances. I am not so sure about the case that first got me thinking about this, Evershot in Dorset, where St John’s Well, source of the River Frome, is just a hundred yards away from the church which once bore the same dedication and which, despite its size and the size of Evershot itself, was just a chapel of Frome St Quintin parish until the 1970s. I think that may be pretty old, perhaps something more on the Cornish model.

On Monday I got home having put in a big order for books from newly-reopened Waterstones in Hornington, and on reading about these abstruse matters realised I had to add another to the list: Elizabeth Rees’s 2020 tome Early Christianity in South-west Britain, which promises to shed light on all these questions. There are even two holy wells on the cover, St Levan’s at St Levan and the Nun’s Well at Pelynt!

But my picture is neither of those: it’s the cistern at the well-chapel at Madron in Cornwall, which I first saw in 1989. Ian Thompson insists it can’t be a baptismal font because it doesn’t drain to earth, which strikes me as spurious though it certainly can’t have been all that easy to use. The Holy Well itself is a little distance away, and, as many writers have pointed out, is very, very hard to get to. When I saw it its loose stonework had been knocked about by cows and the bog was so deep I was in danger of losing my boots, and stood a bit away to take a photo, full of admiration for those brave souls who had got close enough to hang their clouties from the trees around.