Swanvale Halt Book Club: Guy & Catharine English, 'Holy Wells Cornwall, Odyssey & Memorial' (Culture & Democracy Press 2024)

In 2014 Guy and Catharine English began a retirement project of visiting the holy wells of Cornwall. They acquired copies of the books that have surveyed them and started listing, cross-checking, and trudging around lanes and across muddy fields to find out what was there. Sometimes they discovered an entirely unlisted ancient well, which was a special excitement. Then came the covid year of 2020, which separated the couple from the wells and ultimately from each other after fifty years of marriage – not a direct result of the pandemic, but of Catharine’s cancer which they thought had been dealt with. Once the world reopened, and Guy could bear to do so, he carried on their mission – as the book’s title suggests, an ‘odyssey’, which had become a memorial. He acquired a new travelling companion in the form of holy wells photographer and author Phil Cope, who would help pull the book together.

For holy well hunters the corrected map references and descriptions of wells’ current conditions in this book are useful, even if some of the directions are a bit indistinct; necessarily so in the case of St Michael’s Well at Roughtor which, according to Guy English, mysteriously appeared and then was unfindable again from visit to visit. You have to squint a bit at some of the smaller photographs. But, in any case, this isn’t a book to go to for a lot of information as such. Instead it’s an account of Guy and Catharine’s pilgrimage, and together they make it easily the most moving description not just of Cornish holy wells, but sacred waters anywhere. They battle with the weather, sit in the car and eat a pasty, visit a friend while out looking for this or that site, and dry off in a tea room or a pub. Described in very few and unflamboyant words – as is Catharine’s illness and departure from their shared odyssey to go on one of her own – this is the kind of thing we all do when going well-hunting: ordinary, small actions, contained and framed within the very extraordinary action of looking for holy wells, engaging with their deep and powerful history, and moving through their landscapes. Yet nobody has ever thought to describe them in print before.

Captured almost unawares by the strange magic of the wells, Guy and Catharine English are all of us. How gracious of them to share with us their gentle, hopeful journey.

Book website here.