Aquae Avaloniae

Among those of us who discuss these things, Glastonbury's wells have been a topic of conversation over recent months. The Slipper Well and the Blue Spring have been mentioned, apparently new names for sites we knew about, while St Edmund's Well has been revealed to anyone who doesn't live locally as a really rather important site. But while the esoteric history of Glastonbury has been written about ad infinitum nobody has put all the details of the wells in one place. I thought this might be another little project to work on, so yesterday on my way back from Dorset I diverted north to what turned out to be a misty marshland town, the weather only turning sunny several hours after it had been supposed to.

The journey had been wearying enough to make me fall desperately into the café at the Rural Life Museum as soon as I arrived and only walk around afterwards. The Museum occupies the site of Abbey Farm and provides as much of a prosaic contrast as you could imagine with the alternative life of modern Glastonbury. I say 'prosaic', but that's hardly an appropriate word for the mighty medieval Tithe Barn which the farm inherited from the dissolved Abbey. I found the great 18th-century cider press the most charismatic object in the collection. 

In the wall around the Museum site is the first well. This tiny alcove was, as a newspaper sketch from 1888 reveals, once much taller and was probably lowered when the farm closed and the wall was rebuilt. I remember seeing it years ago - in fact, I remember running across the road from my parents' car in the pouring rain to look at it, but paying it little attention because it didn't seem to have a name or any traditions associated with it. In fact that 1888 newspaper article calls it 'The Holy Well' - but not the Slipper Well, the name it seems to have now. It's said to be where pilgrims washed their feet before entering the Abbey precincts. That sounds to me like an idea borrowed from Walsingham, where pilgrims take off their shoes at the Slipper Chapel to walk the last mile to the shrine. 

What of the Blue Spring? That's another relatively recent way of describing Bride's or St Brigid's Well at Beckery to the west of the town, a very important site which may very well represent the oldest Christian monastic settlement in Britain. There's nothing there now, and even the little stone marking the 'traditional site' of the well is hard to find, as my visit demonstrated, and may have been moved from where it used to stand which means we ought perhaps to have another stone marking the traditional location of the marker stone ... The 'Blue Spring' name comes from the complicated story about a blue medieval glass bowl which I'm not going to go into here. I imagine the whole area looks a bit more welcoming in the sunshine!

Back in the town, I called in at the Magdalene Almshouses, a place I'd never visited before, because of a reference someone made to another sacred spring there that pours out of a spout onto the road - indeed it does, though I'm not sure anyone identified it as a holy well until very recently. But the Almshouses are a deeply moving site, a row of tiny one-room 15th-century cells whose last resident died in 1958, and a quiet chapel. I spotted the icons of SS Margaret and Mary Magdalene and recognised the work of John Coleman from his images of the Dorset well-saints Whyte and Edwold. 'Ikon John' was the name the Almshouse volunteers recalled: he had a workshop in one of the cells and talked to visitors about icon-painting and the spirituality behind it.

From there I toiled up the hill, over a stile, and along an overgrown path to St Edmund's Well. This is a site I've known about for years, and in fact have argued that it was the original holy well of Glastonbury, but until about six months ago assumed was lost - until people began to post about it on LiberFaciorum, revealing a well which can hold its own with the best of Cornwall or Ireland, a well-house of some antiquity which is only now coming to anything more than strictly local attention. Additionally, I'd presumed a group of 'Holywell' names north of the Tor referred to St Edmund's Well, but that's not what they say at Holywell Farm, pointing to a spring down the hill as the eponymous Holy Well; I'm not convinced I found the right site, but I'm glad to know it's there.

After that it was a relief to be going downhill to the more famous Glastonbury springs. I've been to Chalice Well plenty of times but it's always pleasing to see people using the site as a tool for their own spiritual lives, drinking the water, wading in it, leaving offerings at the well-head, or sitting in meditative silence ...

... though silence, as such, was a rare commodity across the road at the White Spring, which I'd never visited before. Chalice Well was founded by a group of souls, including Dion Fortune, for instance, who held Christianity and paganism in balance: it's reticent and well-mannered. At White Spring the alternative is much more up-front: people mill about outside playing drums and parting to let vehicles up the road when they need to pass. In the 1870s the town authorities built a waterworks to tap the calcium-rich springs here, but the minerals clogged up the pipes and eventually forced a rethink, leaving behind a building which over the last 20 years has been turned into what anyone can recognise is a deeply powerful water-shrine with an eclectic spirituality. I found entering its dark vaulted space, lit with candles, a bit challenging at first as waves of discordant sound washed over me, and I had to avert my eyes from the people stripping to bathe in the chilly waters of the rear plunge pool! (This is partly why photographs are ruled out at the White Spring). I had a good conversation with Annwyn Avalon who was welcoming visitors to the Spring and who has relocated from the USA, summoned by the call of the Glastonbury springs. This is, of course, not a path I follow, but I know many friends who do, so I lit a candle for them at the Peace Shrine which seemed from its icons of angels to be the most Christian bit, and quietly recited the Magnificat. 

(What was I doing by that? I don't see it as 'reclaiming the space', any more than a pagan coming into my church and offering a prayer to the Goddess alters the nature of that location. Some Christians might argue it did, that some act of counter-reclamation or cleansing might be in order; but the God I believe in doesn't need my defence or anyone else's. He's already in control and there is no power in earth or heaven that can depose him. We can relax). 

Ms Avalon pointed me back into the town for one last visit - the fountain outside the Methodist Church which, so it's said, was built to tap three springs which rise beneath the church itself. Its neo-Norman arch recalls the one well I didn't visit yesterday, St Joseph's Well in the Abbey (I wasn't going to pay another entrance fee just to photograph something I took a snap of 3 years ago). Look at that carved hand pointing towards the Tor! I didn't climb up there, either, and I was very glad to make it back to the car after a long day chasing wells.