Sacred Springs and Holy Wells of the East Riding
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Sacred Springs and Holy Wells of the East Riding ‘If I were called in / To construct a religion/ I should make use of water’ wrote Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Water’. All religions have done so. Water is the source of life and can kill. It heals, cleanses, purifies, and destroys. It’s mysterious, fascinating and capricious: it springs from the earth, the underworld. It shows us our own reflection as could nothing else in prehistory and was used for prophecy. In the Middle Ages, holy water was so precious it was locked away, and the belief of the people in the power of holy wells and springs was so feared by the zealots of the Reformation that they were banned and some destroyed. My interest in this subject was first piqued by this rather quirky book written in 1923 by the Reverend William Smith, which has been referenced by researchers into this topic ever since, although many of the wells and springs he identified are long gone. Why? The usual culprits of the Anthropocene: over-exploitation, abuse and neglect. The water table of the chalk aquifer has been so depleted for drinking and farming that many springs have run dry. Some have been filled in, ploughed over, built upon or repurposed as rubbish dumps or cattle troughs. Others are neglected and unfindable among the brambles. But some have been saved and a few of these we’ll look at. But first we’ll go deep into prehistory to look for local evidence of water awe from ancient times. A visit to the Great Wold Valley, which now holds the Gypsey Race, flowing from Wharram le Street into the sea at Bridlington, must mystify even the casual observer. How can such a wide, gently sloping valley, so different from the usual dry, steep-sided valleys of the Wolds, contain such a tiny, and often completely dry, stream. Geologists now think that this valley was carved by one of the great Yorkshire rivers now flowing into the Ouse and Humber, possibly the Nidd, that was blocked in one of the Ice Ages. The Gypsey Race is a misfit stream, a ‘winterbourne’, a stream like others found in the South Downs and other calcareous parts of Britain. It flows from the chalk aquifer and is intermittent due to the changing water levels in the rock reservoir. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1722, was mystified by the locals’ talk of the ‘gypsies’ or ‘vipseys’ as they were then spelt, pronounced with a hard ‘g’, as in the original Norse word ‘gypa’ for geyser. He soon realised they were not 1 describing the travelling folk, but a natural phenomenon. ‘At some certain seasons, for none knows when it will happen, several streams of water gush out of the earth with great violence, spouting up a huge heighth, being really natural jettes d’eaus or fountains; that they make a great noise, and, joining together form little rivers, and so hasten to the sea … the country people have a notion that whenever those gypsies, or, as some call them, vipseys , break out, there will certainly ensue either famine or plague.’ Defoe then remembered a similar superstition in Surrey and indeed this was a common folklore of these winterbournes, which became known as ‘waters of woe’. They must have been more spectacular in the past before the water levels in the aquifer were depleted. In 1910, there was such a flood that a young boy drowned in Cottam Dale. There are many springs along the eastern side of the Wolds that fountain erratically from pinhole-sized holes in the chalk, and springs that burst through the overlying clays called locally ‘naffers’ as in Nafferton. Left: the Gypsey Race in the wet summer of 2019. The Great Wold Valley has been described as possibly the third most important site of ritual monuments in Britain after Salisbury Plain and Orkney. Much less well known than these, because it has been largely ploughed out, it is still lined by a few visible burial mounds, remains of cursus monuments, and the largest monolith in Britain at Rudston, where the Gypsey race turns south, suggesting that the valley was seen by people of the Neolithic and Bronze Age as a sacred place. Above: Willy Howe on the Great Wold Valley Page 3 left: Rudston Monolith and Church Page 3 right: The Great Wold Valley from Weaverthorpe Church 2 Another interesting local site is Leven Carrs, the site of the Leven Canal, below, cut in 1801 probably through one of the seventy ancient meres, relics of the Ice Age and now drained in East Yorkshire with only Hornsea Mere remaining. With chalk springs feeding into it, the flora gives it SSSI status, including species which may have found refugia here after the last Ice Age. Above left: Leven Canal. Above right top: Bladderwort, a carnivorous plant that traps organisms underwater. Above right below: White Water Lily, both growing in the canal. 3 The area has been the site of human exploitation since Mesolithic times, but several Bronze Age weapons have been found here, deliberately broken and deposited in these marshlands, part of some unexplained ritual, as in these broken swords below held by East Riding Museums. This phenomenon is well documented throughout Britain and is clearly not accidental loss but deliberate breaking and placing of valuable objects, put beyond use, in a ritual event. The sign reads ‘Gifts to forgotten gods have seen the light of day once more’. Close to the canal is the site of one of the lost holy wells: St Faith’s Well, now filled in. Only the graveyard of the old church survives (below), on a small rise north of Hall Garth, the old manor house of Leven. The church was replaced in 1843 by the new Holy Trinity in modern Leven village. To find the most well known of the restored holy wells in our area you need to visit one of the holiest of places, Goodmanham. This, according to Venerable Bede, was the site of the Celtic pagan temple (‘godo’ or ‘uncovered sanctuary’). Bede described its destruction by the Northumbrian high priest Coifi after a dramatic ride from York, when his master King Edwin was converted to Christianity by his wife Ethelburga and her priest, Paulinus. The Church of all Hallows contains a possibly Saxon font that was recovered from a local farm where it had been used as a drinking trough. The receptacles for holy water could go the same way as the wells. 4 There are three reputedly holy wells around the village, but the restored one is St Helen’s Well on the Hudson Way. This was renovated by the Guides in 1983 and is a ‘rag well’ or ‘clootie well’. Rag wells are traditional wells used for healing, prophecy and wishing or prayer. A tree, in this case an elder but often a hawthorn, would be draped with rags, taken from the clothes of the afflicted person. The rag would first be dipped in the water, and sometimes the supplicant would drink or bathe in the water too. The prayer would be made, the person might walk around the tree in the direction of the sun across the sky, and the rag would be tied to the tree. This must be a very old practice, but one that persisted in some parts into the 20th century, and perhaps is still practised. Look at this description from Janet Bord’s book Sacred Waters, reporting a record of visit to a holy well in Edinburgh a hundred years ago. Many sacred wells were reported to give cures for eye ailments. ‘The crown departed and the group came forward , consisting of two old women, a younger woman of about thirty, and a pale, sickly-looking girl – a child of three or four years. Producing cups from their pockets, the old women dipped them in the pool, filled them, and drank their contents. A full cup was then presented to the younger woman, and another to the child, then one of the old women produced a long linen bandage, dipped it in the water, wrung it, dipped it in again, and then wound it round the child’s head, covering the eyes; the youngest woman, evidently the mother of the child, carefully observing the operation and weeping gently all the time. The other old woman not engaged in this work was carefully filling a clear glass bottle with the water, evidently for future use. Then after the principal operators had looked at each other with an earnest and half-solemn sort of look, the party wended its way carefully down the hill.’ Poignancy is there in some of the messages posted on the tree today, though ribbons have replaced rags. 5 The well is dedicated to St Helen, along with another seven in the old East Yorkshire, as described by the Rev. Smith, and more in the rest of Yorkshire. Why St Helen? She was the mother of Constantine the Great, who was born in York. Various stories exist about her birth, some say she was a publican’s daughter, others that she was high-born in Bythnia. We do know she was abandoned by her husband, Constantius, after the birth of her son, so he could make a more suitable marriage for his imperial ambitions. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where she is reputed to have found fragments of the true cross and founded churches in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. She’s an important saint in Eastern Orthodox churches. But there is an earlier figure in the frame, Elen, a Celtic goddess, so this story may be older than we think.