I have an article detailing over a dozen "Holy/ Sacred" Wells clustered in the hills around a small highland Scottish town. They were all "springs" and flowed year round. The article was was published in a small Scottish Circulation Magazine in the 1970s.
The author visited and photographed all of the sites only one of which was listed on the OS Sheet for the area. Most were overgrown and completely forgotten. Some had stone-lined pools, font-type arrangements or emerged from the rock in a small "waterfall".
He was working from church documents, an 18th Century book and other local sources. It was fascinating. The small highland town has a presence going back directly to the early Scottish/ Pictish Christian Church, Dark Age remains, a significant and lengthy (multi-period) Roman Military presence and a Prehistory reaching back millenia even before that.
The author's summing up was that the "Sacred" or "Holy" aspects of the multitude of wells was that they flowed year round. They had no particular Holy or Sacred connection aside from the fact they had been used for a very long time.
For obvious reasons I wont be directing anyone towards the piece... but is the fact that the spring has always flowed "enough"to make it "sacred". I have no quibble with any listing of such sites. Simply that which makes them "sacred" to one, might make it a "natural spring" to another. Fleeting Church associations aside... I find it a tough pickle to get the "sacred" bit.
But I really like them!
|
