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Garlanding the Well: Dressing Village Wells in Britain's Peak District
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19829 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
3,156 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Both the secular and religious sides of modern life have traces of the ancient worship of the gods of water. The waters of Lourdes have a Christian tinge these days, as has the well of Saint Anne in Buxton, Derbyshire, England. The quasi-magical curative powers of secular spas all over Europe dress up the old pagan faith in the contemporary jargon of mineral impurities and fringe medicine, with rows of Vichy and other "healthy" waters as heavily disguised evangels of the ancient gods, placed solemnly on the banal secular altars that we call supermarket shelves.
Our modern tributes to the old water gods--now branded and bottled--tend to take the form of money. But this was not always so. In earlier pagan ages, a well or spring was "dressed" by tying rags, usually red, to the trees or bushes around it. Himalayan tribes still preserve their old custom of leaving colorful rags to please the spirit of a well, and in the Scottish Highlands it is possible to find such wells today. At the summer solstice or other seasonal pagan festivals, these wells would be garlanded with flowers and greenery. The custom continued under Christianity, with the old spirits displaced by saints. All over Britain, the sources of fresh water were honored and feted on high Sundays like Whitsunday and Ascension Day.
When the influence of Puritanism infected British life in the late sixteenth and, especially, the seventeenth centuries, such idolatrous practices were frowned on. The austere (or sour-spirited) Cromwellian Parliament attempted to stamp out well dressing but found itself now and again defeated, both by social inertia and by an occasional spooky coincidence. The English biographer John Aubrey wrote of how the citizens of Droitwich were forced by Puritans to give up garlanding the town's saline well. When the ceremony stopped, so did the supply of water. "Notwithstanding the power of the Parliament ... the Minister there and also the Soldiers, they did and will dress it, and the water returned again."
In time, however, the old ritual of well dressing faded away in all but a few places. After a revival in the nineteenth century, its manner changed. Instead of simple garlands and floral decorations arranged as wreaths, villagers constructed arches and frames of wood that were spread with wet clay. Flowers were set by the stem into the clay, making colorful patterns and pictures. This new method may have come from Italy, where such a tradition survives in Genzano di Roma and other towns as the Infiorata, the festival of flower petals. Each year on the Saturday night after Corpus Christi, brilliant patterns of flower petals are laid out on
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