Last Well and Testament

Shepherd's Rae

You've heard of emergency blips ... well, this is emergency well blip taken on my way back from a trip to see a friend.

As it will probably be my last well for freespiral's excellent 'International Holy Wells Month' (although I can't promise I won't slip another holy well in sneakily sometime .... as I now feel that no well can go unturned), I feel that this well is a good example of some of the many layers that this quest has exposed to the uninitiated well hunter like me. 

Firstly, is it a well?
Well, no .. it's a spring.
Does that mean it doesn't count? I'm not sure.
Are all wells springs ... are some springs wells?
When do they get to be holy?
What's the difference between holy and sacred? (I'm guessing this marks out very early pagan wells from those with more clear cut religious association).
And so the questions go on ....

And then there are the other layers, the ones to do with time, with sense of place, with lost significance, with significances that have changed and adapted over time, water supplies that have had significance invested, medicinal, healing, spiritual, recreational, baths, spas .... and so it goes on ...

So much well unfolding to be done ....
Which brings me on to another point ... that of 'a quest' and how these places have always been here, under my nose more or less ... and that makes me realise how much we 'drift through' not noticing ... the limits of our awareness ... and there is another rich vein in all of that.

Plus, this isn't the well I intended to blip today, I had 2 aborted attempts at finding another and even this one is confusingly down as St Anne's Well, which it isn't ... The path of the well hunter is not always smooth.

And another thing, wells have another little-known quality ... they absolve the earnest well hunter from ever needing to do housework.

Anyway, this is a beautiful polished piece of the local Shap granite (extra) that tops the original spring that was an important local water source which likely had previous links to a much earlier history relating to the ancient stone circle and avenue at Shap. Steps at the side go down to the water source.

It was put there in 1896 in memory of Mary Agnes, a local man, James Shepherd-Rae's daughter, who died in St Lucia and it bears the inscription, 'There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains' (Psalm 72 v16).