A small pilgrimage, without knowing it

I drove to near Gloucester to shop before picking Helena up from her work at the after school club at Hempsted school. We'd arranged for her to then take me on a short walk through the churchyard to follow an old track, now upgraded to the Glevum Way, to see The Lady Well, which she had discovered a couple of weeks ago, so close to the school.

It was very dark and dank, with low clouds and slight drizzle. It seemed more like the atmosphere was saturated than actually raining. The fields were very lush and covered in tall buttercups as we emerged from the footpath which passed through a thicket and overgrown with nettles.

The cows were in another part of the field but their pats were ever present. When we got to the filed with the Lady Well in it, we found it was perched on the edge of a slope which dropped down to a stream that in turn lead withing a few hundredd yards to the main River Severn. I say main because the waterways are well managed around here, with the Sharpness Canal having been canalised to allow sea-going boats to navigate up the Severn from the Bristol Channel, which they have done since Roman times or earlier. Gloucester was a vitally important Roman camp sited at a crossing of the Severn or Sabrina as they called it.

In fact, I now gather the field boundary just a few yards above the Well on the left has earthworks and other remains, which are at least Roman if not earlier. There wasn't much water to be seen through the locked grill, but the land around it was very water0logged and trampled by the cattle. You can just see the tower of St Swithun's Church, in Hempsted, in the background.

I have nicked some info from a couple of web sites:

The well head is an oolitic limestone gable-roofed structure, with an ogival-arched doorway to the main outfall. The building is from the 14th century. On the west side is a small arched opening, formerly closed with an iron door. In front of the well water issues into a long stone trough. The north and south walls are plain, but in the gable of the east wall is a very worn sculpture which appears to show a large figure standing between two smaller figures.

Canon Bazeley suggested it may represent St Anne standing between her daughter St Mary and an angel (or perhaps her husband), arguing that the well was probably connected with the nearby priory of Llanthony on the outskirts of Gloucester, which was dedicated to St Anne in 1136. He suggests the well may once have been dedicated to St Anne, possibly originally deriving its name from the similarity of the sound of 'Anne' and 'Wan', implying a pre-Christian pagan well here dedicated to the god Wan (= Woden). Hope quotes the sculpture as representing the Virgin addressing a crowd. In recent times the well has always been known as Our Lady's Well supporting Hope's interpretation.

It has long been venerated as a place of pilgrimage; one tradition claims that the mother of Christ, the Virgin Mary, set foot here, and that the spring arose to quench her thirst. An alternative story is that the well was dedicated to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, but this seems to be less likely, although some people call the structure St Anne's Well. The well was considered to have medicinal properties until recently.