Chad Well, Twyning

Twyning (pronounced Twinning) is derived from the Saxon 'tweoneum' and 'ingas', which roughly translates as "between place". And that's exactly what it is, a "between place" formed by two conjoining major rivers, the Severn and the Avon, which flow together (often with copious flooding) a couple of miles further south at Tewkesbury.

There are several River Avons in the UK but this one is the 'Warwickshire Avon' which flows through Shakespeare's home town. I find it somewhat softer and greener and more friendly than the Severn.

The River Avon, close to the site of the Chad Well.

Twyning is a pretty place and is a large parish in two parts, with its church forming the centre for a kind of sub-village (called Church End) a mile or so south of the main village of Twyning Green. It also has a holy well, not in either of the two villagey bits but in a quite isolated location on the bank of the River Avon. This well is an unassuming and even somewhat neglected feature, about which very little is really known, although it's old enough to get its name in blackletter script on the Ordnance Survey map. There are no signposts to it but it's easily found if you take a walk southwards along the river bank from the Fleet pub in Twyning village, and is recognisable by the square section of post-and-rails fencing around it. Unfortunately it isn't possible to access it any closer than this fence, but you can see the logic in keeping it enclosed, otherwise somebody would certainly get an accidental dunking. It's flush with the surface of the field and quite well camouflaged with grasses.

The Chad Well is inside the square fenced-off area (top right) and flows out into the River Avon from a pipe underneath this log.

Generally called Chad Well, it's also known as St. Chad's Well and is clearly named after the 7th century missionary St. Chad of Mercia, an Anglo-Saxon Bishop of York and of Lichfield whose name (a British-Celtic name rather than a Saxon one) is attached to a great number of healing wells. Indeed he has become something of a patron saint for holy wells. The well is circular and about 2ft in diameter and 1ft deep, rimmed with stone. It comprises a capped spring, with the stone basin collecting the water which is then piped underground to the bank of the Avon.

The well, looking rather unsaintly with algae, nettles and a plastic bottle.

 Detail of the rim which is built from stone blocks. I don't know how old this stonework is.

During the 20th century the Chad Well became very neglected and by the mid 1980s it appeared to be nothing more than a patch of wet mud with a few barbed wire entanglements (see here for photos). Around 1987 it was cleared out and restored. These days it has become a bit overgrown with weeds and as you can see, has had some litter chucked in it. But it does still have a flow of water through it and underneath the layers of gunk it is still very bright and clear. Its outflow sploshes out a few yards to the east, through a pipe, and straight into the River Avon. The outflow is one place where you can access the water directly, though I can't vouch for how clean it is these days. I have a little self-anointing ritual I do with wells and springs but it doesn't involve taking the waters internally. Beware also of ferocious boot-sucking mud around the outflow site.

The outflow

Unsubstantiated local legends claim that St. Chad personally blessed the well as he was passing through on his way to Bristol. It may possibly be true, as he had a monastic cell at Pershore, which is not all that far away, and holy wells were often set up as points for baptism around and about the area. But dedications of wells to St. Chad are very common all over the country, and not necessarily an indication that he had anything to do with them. Chad apparently had a penchant for meditating while immersed naked in a freezing cold well in Lichfield (don't knock it till you've tried it) and as such he has become strongly associated with wells in a very general way. It's particularly common for healing wells to be named in his honour. Dr Bruce Osborne suggests that Chad Well may simply be a corruption of 'cealdwiella', meaning 'cold well'. But he also puts forward the idea that Chad's patronage of sacred wells is a Christianisation of the Celtic/Norse deity Ceadda, a god or goddess (gender is uncertain) of wells and springs. This I do find intriguing, because the name is strikingly similar to Cuda, a local Celtic goddess of Cotswold rivers and springs.

Either way, the bottom line is that the dedication to Chad may not indicate anything very much, other than that the waters had medicinal properties. Chad Well at Twyning was considered to be effective for eye disorders in particular, and also for skin complaints, with leprosy included on the list of conditions it was recommended for!

Church of St Mary Magdalene, Twyning 

The reasons for this healing holy well being established where it is, an isolated spot some distance from Church End, the oldest part of Twyning parish, are lost in the mists of time. But Twyning is a place which has been settled from earliest times, showing evidence of continuous human activity from the Neolithic period through the Bronze and Iron Ages, Roman and Saxon times. Its location between two big rivers was a good natural defence, and the confluence of rivers had a spiritual significance to the pre-Roman Britons, although there's no surviving evidence of a Celtic temple here. There was, however, a church of some kind as far back as the 7th century, i.e. St. Chad's time, and it had become established as a fairly important minster by the 8th century. The present church of St. Mary Magdalene was built in the late 11th century, though with a lot of subsequent alterations and rebuildings. The Victorians stamped their meddling misguided zeal on it, but nevertheless there are still parts of it which are original and the north wall features some reused Norman decorated stonework. It's likely that the church was built directly on the site of the former Saxon minster.

The main village, Twyning Green, with a road leading down to the river (and Chad Well)

Sources:
Armstrong, B.E., A Short History and Guide to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Twyning, Gloucestershire (church guide, 2002 edition).
Holy Wells and Water Lore forum, which includes some interesting photos taken in 1986-7.
Twyning Parish Council website has some info about St. Chad.
Online paper by Dr Bruce Osborne on St Chad: Patron Saint of Medicinal Springs.

Hawkwood

When William Capel inherited a fine historic Jacobean manor house on the wooded rolling slopes of the Stroud Valley in 1842, he did what any rich, assertive young Victorian squire would have done. He demolished it and had it rebuilt in a fashionable neo-Gothic style.

He was an extremely wealthy landowner and landlord of many houses and cottages all around the Painswick and Stroud area. He was a powerful Tory and a County Magistrate, one time High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, and he built the imposing and dominant house not just as his residence but as a fitting emblem of his status. What he didn't know, as he sat in his luxurious living room quaffing his port and peering through the mullioned windows at the expanse of his copious estate, was that the door-frames and skirting boards all around him were filled with secret messages.

It's impossible to know exactly how the site, now run as Hawkwood College, would have looked through the ages. At the time William Capel inherited it – just one of a family line who lived in the house for centuries – it was known as The Grove and occupied its beautiful position as part of a substantial estate. During the 17th century the house was owned by a family called Mayo, and when their surviving heir was a girl, Hester, who married one Samuel Capel in 1700 and bought out her sisters' shares in the estate, the family name changed but the genetic line continued. It's unclear who built the Jacobean manor house but traces of medieval stonework have turned up which indicate an earlier origin for the site. I'd always understood that there was a monastery (or more likely, a small religious cell) there at one time, but so far no evidence has been found to support this. Other than the occasional psychic impressions of visitors, who have been known to 'see' cowled figures mooching about the grounds, even when they didn't have any previous knowledge of the monastery story.

I'd go a step further and say that the Hawkwood College site has the feel of having been a sacred place throughout time. It has the most extraordinary atmosphere, and is quite unlike any other place I've known. It has a focused and contained kind of energy, as if its sanctity is insulated from the outside world, and when you're inside it you feel as though anything is possible.

The building, which feels as magically charged as the land it sits on, is perched on a ledge in the landscape underneath a slope covered by woodland. It has a magnificent view to the south over the meadows to the town of Stroud and beyond (the clod-hopping white bulk of the new SGS College campus notwithstanding – how did they get planning permission for that?) and the adjacent Cotswold scarp, and if you go and stand on the top of the Toots long barrow on Selsley Common you can clearly see Hawkwood across the valley with its distinctive Gothic gables. On the lawn beside the house there rises a spring, whose cool bright chalybeate loveliness flows steadily throughout the year (when I was younger I used to take it home in bottles and make wine with it – it's wonderful stuff – makes a lovely cup of tea too).

Immediately beside the spring is a mammoth, venerable sycamore tree. This tree has its own spring welling up underneath it, and the thick roots of the sycamore form a basin in which a little pool of water stands, lightly strewn with leaves. It's a scene straight from the legend of Gereint and Enid in the Mabinogion, where a sycamore stands beside a spring in an enchanted garden. I wouldn't like to speculate how old the tree is (at least 300 years, I'm told, and probably older, which is unusual for a sycamore), or whether the spring was ever considered a holy well, but standing beside it the whirly churning feeling in your stomach tells you that this is a very special place indeed. The Hawkwood double spring has a very special active-passive energy, one spring gushing out over the land and the other gently enclosed by a naturally formed well.

William Capel is shown in the 1841 census in his early 30s and living with his mum in what must then have been the Jacobean manor house. He was still unmarried at the time and in fact didn't marry until later life. He's described in the following census as a Magistrate and Proprietor of Land, Farming 500 Acres. Among his domestic staff, in 1871, can be found a young man called William Gurney, who lived in the house as a domestic servant. He came from Maisemore and was in fact Ivor Gurney's uncle!

Presumably it was when William Capel's mum passed away that he decided to knock down the ancestral home. A few bits of stonework from the older house still survive, but the rebuilding was substantial, and he also had some new cellars added. The Gothic design of the building is very much the style of the classic Cotswold manor house and built from beautiful honey-coloured local ashlar. There are some beautiful decorative details, like this foliate head – which may be a green man but probably more likely a lion or similar beastie.

Among the skilled craftsmen employed to work on the rebuilding of the house was a carpenter and joiner named William Clifton. He was born in Chipping Norton on or around 24th January 1816, and after serving an apprenticeship in Witney, spent the rest of his life in Tetbury, where he married the daughter of another carpenter. In 1843, at the age of 27, he was working at The Grove (Hawkwood) where he was responsible for much of the decorative woodwork around door frames and skirting boards. We know this because he signed and dated many of the fixtures before fitting them in place.

A number of intriguing pieces of wood with pencil scribbles on the back have been coming to light over the last 40 years or so in the course of repairs and alterations. But the extent and detail of it only became clear a couple of years ago, when a burst mains water pipe in the upper part of the house caused a devastating flood in the downstairs sitting room. In the course of clearing up the damage, the skirting boards were taken off and revealed the prevalence of William Clifton's literary endeavours – and his political views.

"Down with Kings and Queens and the Aristocracy and all Tyrants". One of William Clifton's secret messages, written on the back of a chunk of wood which lay hidden within the house for 168 years.

 This piece is signed "Wm Clifton Chipping Norton" (his birthplace, although he lived in Tetbury) and is dated 1843. The two slogans read "Down with Kings and Queens" and "Universal Suffrage for ever".

Like many working class people in the 1840s, William Clifton was a Chartist. Some of his slogans include direct references to the Chartist movement, others refer more generally to its principles. One of them was signed "He who has no voice in the making of Laws by which he is governed is a Slave. William Clifton".  I don't know how he felt about his employer William Capel and whether he had him in mind when he condemned the ruling classes – Capel was a respected man in society, but what kind of person he was and how he treated his staff is much harder to know – but Clifton was performing a powerful act of talismanic magic in hiding such fiery sentiments under the boards of a country squire's house.

And in its way, his magic worked, even if it took its time. The last of the Capel dynasty died in 1932, and the house and its somewhat diminished estate was sold to a bloke called Colonel Murray. Murray was a bit of a military history fanatic, and it was he who rechristened the house Hawkwood – named after his hero, the 14th century mercenary Sir John Hawkwood. A few years later it was sold to Roland and Lily Whincop, who founded an adult education college there based around the principles of Rudolf Steiner.

William Clifton didn't live long enough to encounter the work of Steiner; he died in Tetbury in March 1872 at the age of 56. But he would probably have been pleased with what the house has turned into: a socially and environmentally responsible college which anybody can attend for education or spiritual refreshment – with the landed proprietor and the class system of unbalanced social power long gone. He also didn't live to see the introduction of universal suffrage, the cause in which he believed so passionately, although one of the succession of "Reform Acts" in the Victorian era may possibly have granted him a right to vote in 1867 when suffrage was extended to include skilled working class men (prior to that, you had to be an owner of property to have the vote). But universal suffrage didn't find its way into British statute until 1918.

Hawkwood remains an incredibly special place. As well as its education programme it provides a venue for all kinds of creative and spiritual groups, and was the scene of Gareth Knight's legendary ritual workshops during the 1980s. The Gareth Knight Group was founded in its dining room in 1973, and still meets at Hawkwood today. And if you're among those who encounter one of the strange presences that are occasionally seen or heard in the upper rooms and corridors of the house, don't be alarmed, just remember that it's a place where the walls are full of magic.

With special thanks to Dave James, Head of Maintenance at Hawkwood College, who provided much of the historical information and kindly allowed me to photograph his collection of door jambs.

Well in the Wildwood: the Mussel Well, Churchdown

Churchdown Hill, locally called Chosen Hill, solitary bump in the vale, marshy under the weight of its springs. Only one spring is named. In fact it has three names. The Ordnance Survey map tantalisingly marks the Mussel Well in the woods on the NW slope on or near the ramparts of an Iron Age camp, but without making entirely clear exactly where it is. Older maps show it as the Muzzel Well, with similar lack of precision. Other local sources refer to it, rightly or wrongly, as the Roman Well.

Never mind the maps; how difficult can it be to find a well?

Er ... moderately, in my experience. One of the problems is that you don't know what you're looking for, unless you've seen a picture of it previously. A "well" might turn out to be anything from an elaborate system of stone-built channels and chambers to a simple puddle on the ground. If the Ordnance Survey marks it as a "well" rather than a "spring" then that usually means there's some kind of visible man-made structure in place. Usually, but not always.

Well hidden: the slopes of Churchdown Hill are smothered with ancient woodland.

The first time I tried to discover the Mussel Well I didn't find it. Pitching into the faery-haunted woods below St Bartholomew's church, the magical church-on-a-tump which reminds me a little bit of Glastonbury Tor (only a bit flatter), I soon found myself hopelessly disorientated among the shady tangle of oak, ash and thorn. I squidged my way along endless stretches of boot sucking quagmire – abundant springs just under the surface ensure the paths remain perpetually muddy for most of the year – but realised I didn't have a clue where to look. I tried following my intuition, which led me towards a slight clearing in the trees on a steep slope (the whole hilltop is an Iron Age hillfort), but I was inadequately shod to make my way across an expanse of perilously sloping slop, studded with dog turds, to get to it, and so I reluctantly gave up. Not that I'm a cissy about falling on my arse in the mud, but I prefer not to do it with an expensive camera dangling round my neck. My frustration was increased when I got home and referred back to the maps because I realised that I'd been going the right way and must only have been a matter of yards away from finding it.

So I went back another day with a renewed resolve and a robust pair of boots. This time I got through the mud obstacles with ease, sending iridescent flies spinning from chunks of canine crap in the sunlight, but still no well. I trekked down the path one way, then trekked back up it the other way, all to no avail, and thought I was going to have to give up again. And then a distinctly smug voice in my head said "it's not so hard to find, you know." Meaning that oh yes it is hard to find, but my inner senses could lead me to it if only I'd let them. A moment later I noticed a narrow, informal path running up the rampart slope between the trees, and up it I went. Still no sign of a well, but half way up the earthworks my eye was drawn to a very imposing tree. An old hollow ash with whirls of ivy draped over it and a tall, triangular opening at the base.

Now, holey trees like this are a magnetic draw to my pagan soul, so I went over to get a closer look at it. There was something so powerful about its aura though that I was afraid to go too close; this was a tree Not-To-Be-Messed-With. I've rarely seen ash trees as big and old as this, and it appeared to be part of a row of mature ashes standing in a line; even within the wood with other trees all around, they stood out as venerable sentinels. And when I looked at the next one along, another tangle of ancient boughs, I saw that snuggled under its roots was a stone trough. Aha!

The Mussel Well – and I assume this is the Mussel Well, although there's no sign to say so – is an unprepossessing rectangular trough of indeterminate age, repaired or rebuilt multiple times by the look of it, obscured by dirt and moss and encroached by brambles. The water emerges from a metal pipe in a concrete block embedded into the hillside and falls into the trough, which is only a few inches deep and partially filled with well-rotted crud. The water then flows out through a second pipe at the front end. But maybe flows isn't the right word, because it's really somewhere between a trickle and a drip. So slight, in fact, that there's no drainage as such. The water drips into what appears to be a fairly primitive soakaway and barely even wets the ground. Intriguingly though, the ground below the well has a gulley cut through it as if there were formerly a stream running down the slope, although it's now dry and filled with brambles. There are also a few bits of stone lying about, half buried, which may have been part of it at some point.

Because of the slowness of the flow, the water in the trough is stagnant. I have a little self-anointing ritual I normally do when I encounter a well or spring, but the deep green depths of this pool revealed unappetising corpses of flies and worms and a host of unsavoury insect larva thingies wiggling about in it under a filmy sheen of gluck on the surface, and I really didn't feel inclined to dip my fingers in it. So I compromised by dipping my fingers in the drip of water coming out of the pipe, which was of course just as dirty and disgusting as the trough, but didn't look as horrible.

I'm not painting a very romantic view of this site am I? I have to say though, despite the state of the physical attributes, this felt like a spot with a bit of sacred whoomph behind it. Much of this was coming from the great gnarled and twisted ivy-mantled ash tree which stands guard beside it, a tree with a very active faery presence which takes its guardianship role very seriously, thank you very much. It's no good telling the tree spirit that the well is dirty and polluted; it presides over an older and deeper presence which goes beyond physical conditions.

The guardian of the well

Aside from the ambiance of the place, what can I tell you about the well? Available information is negligible. Most guides to Churchdown Hill make mention of the Mussel Well (frequently misspelt "Mussell") but none seem to offer any enlightenment. The local authority tourist information singles it out as one of the significant historical sites on the hill, and then says simply: "its history is obscure." Right, OK then. There doesn't seem to be any clue as to why it's called the Mussel Well, which I assume doesn't have anything to do with molluscs because the name appears to have evolved from an earlier form spelled "Muzzel". And there aren't any molluscs around here anyway, except fossilised ones. Perhaps the answer lies in an obscure land deed or reference library somewhere.

The Woodland Trust, who own and manage the woods, don't have a lot of historical information either, but they do mention in their leaflet that the Mussel Well provides a water supply to nearby Green Farm via a hidden pipe. If that's the case, then it explains why the current flow of the well is so depleted, and why it has the appearance of having been more gushing in the past. It's hard to guess at the age of the trough, as it looks to have been patched up several times; it has some white ceramic-lined bricks which look to be about a century old, and the lower stonework appears older. The alternative name, the Roman Well, implies that the site, if not the trough, dates back to Roman times – but such names can be misleading. There's no doubt that Churchdown Hill was a site of interest and activity for the Romans, and there's a set of steps credited to them on a nearby slope. But the bank in which the well is set is part of the Iron Age earthwork, long predating the Roman occupation. The well must surely have been known by the Dobunni people who lived here in pre-Christian times, although whether it was simply a water supply or had a religious significance I don't know (though I know what my intuition tells me).

One of the only references I've found in any of my books is in Stephen Yeates' A Dreaming for the Witches (which, interestingly enough, has an aerial photo of Churchdown Hill on the cover). He cites an earlier history of Churchdown by W.T. Swift, published 1905, which reports sightings of a faery funeral procession coming through the entrance of the Iron Age ramparts and disappearing into the hillside at an ash tree by the Mussel Well. There are of course many folk traditions about faeries seen or encountered at a well in the woods: the Mabinogion, the legend of the Faery Melusine, the folk song Tam Lin, and many medieval literary sources. As bonkers as these things may seem to modern readers, I have to say that having felt the aura of awe around that opening in the ash tree, not to mention the intensely solicitous green guardian of the ash tree beside the well, the idea of this place being a long established portal into faery doesn't seem very surprising to me!

A walk in the sacred landscape: Uley

Hetty Pegler's Tump

It has taken over five thousand years to work the spiritual loom over the land between Uley and Nympsfield, two villages up on the Cotswold scarp between Stroud and Dursley. The area is overflowing with ancient monuments, you can barely move without stubbing your toe on a long barrow. But it seems to me that, with so many meaningful relics in such close proximity, the whole of this area must be a sacred place in its own right. Indeed the name Nympsfield is thought to mean "field near the holy place". So as well as taking in some of the obvious tourist spots, it seems to me it's worth sauntering around and in between them to see what might be here that isn't on the map.

My visit to this site starts with my meeting Western Mysteries author Gordon Strong at Hetty Pegler's Tump, in my capacity as publisher of his forthcoming book. The insides of Neolithic burial chambers are not the conventional place to have publishers' business meetings, but that's the advantage of co-running your own press – you can be as weird as you like. I stop off en route for a flying visit to Nympsfield Long Barrow and its Bronze Age neighbour the "Soldier's Grave", a round barrow hidden in the adjacent woods. Ever the rabid snapper, I have to lie on the ground to get the best camera angle on the Nympsfield stones, but fortunately Gordon knows what I'm like and isn't bothered that I turn up looking dishevelled and smelling of fox wee. Hetty Pegler is welcoming ... she smells a bit damp and wee-like herself.

Inside the 5,000-year-old tump (above) there is plenty of space to sit comfortably and chat about the powers and origins of barrows, the electric torch redundant as the sun pelts against the east-facing tunnel entrance and illuminates the passageway just enough to create a pleasant twilight. I sit with my back to a pitch dark side chamber and Gordon asks me my views on the purpose of barrows, so I talk about ancestors and the disarticulated burials, how the barrow people moved and mixed the bones. Like most Cotswold barrows, Hetty Pegler's Tump contained at least 20 skeletons, all jumbled. I'm just waffling on about how lovely and peaceful barrows are, and that even though they are burial chambers they never feel like graves, more of a comforting, nurturing sanctuary where you hang out with the ancestors and never feel frightened. At that moment there is a strange scratching noise in the darkness behind me. "What the fuck is that?" I strain to identify it. Maybe it's a rodent burrowing in the earth on top of the barrow? No, it's definitely something moving about in the chamber behind me. A gnawing, scratching, fluttering noise that gets more intense the longer I sit there. Bugger. Am I going to get a rat running across my leg or a bat whistling past my head? Fortunately neither transpires. I still don't know what it was. I gave the chamber a once-over with the torch on the way out and couldn't see anything.

Looking outwards

Hetty Pegler's is one of the most atmospheric long barrows I've ever visited, and here's a curious thing: this tump has been ravaged and savaged multiple times and what "survives" today is largely a reconstruction, and yet it remains imbued with a tingling sense of potency. Whereas poor old Nympsfield Long Barrow, its mound scalped and its stone chambers standing open to the sky, has almost no atmosphere left at all that I can discern. Putting aside the obvious psychological factor that a dark passageway underground is always going to be more evocative than an open ruin, I sense that the power of a long barrow is connected to enclosure, darkness at its core. When light floods into its hollows and the sun warms the stones, ephemeral ancestral threads dissolve away. The opened barrow is disengaged, its dynamo unhitched.

 Nympsfield long barrow: nice orthostats, shame about the vibes

An hour later Gordon has gone on his way and I saunter on up to Uley Bury, a fairly enormous Iron Age hillfort perched above the village. The middle bit is fenced off and accessible only to cows, but you can walk around the perimeter, between the ramparts. It's more than a mile all round, and the sun is starting to blaze, but emboldened by a tasty half of Pig's Ear ale from the local Uley Brewery, I set off. Within minutes I'm down on my hands and knees inspecting the wild blossoms. What caught my eye was this rather beautiful vetch blossom. Vetch is very common; I suppose that's why it's called Common Vetch. But I was struck by the intense and velvety purple of this particular patch growing on the ramparts – far more vivid in colour than the stuff I usually see.

Vetch, in beautiful magenta-purple, alongside some speedwell and a plantain "sparkler". To me, no domestic flower garden is as beautiful as this.

Uley Bury holds a memory of the Dobunni people; their golden horse emblems have turned up here on the odd coin find. Some parts of the fort are more atmospheric than others, and it seems to be focused in hotspots. On more than one occasion I am drawn towards a tree on the ramparts which seems to be blazing with inner life, only to find when I approach it that the ground yields beneath the grass and I'm standing over a not-quite-breaking-the-surface spring. The most striking of these trees is a mature elder close to the southern gateway, which stands as a green beacon, flaming on the inner levels. A stream of umbelliferous blossoms courses by at the root.

The outer plane view is pretty stunning too, especially to the south and west. A smoothly exquisite tump, Downham Hill, rises from the perfect greenness of fields. It's naturally formed, a natural outsider, a bubble that spurted from the contiguous heave of the Cotswolds, but with its glorious contours and soft sculpted shape and the little flutter of trees on the top, it looks like a giant long barrow.

Downham Hill, as seen from Uley Bury

During my walk around Uley Bury, I spot a translucent rainbow on the ground. Digging it out I find a small shard of glass, old bottle-glass weathered smooth, aqua-green with iridescent curves which the sun brings out in all colours as I turn it different ways in the light. I get a sense I may need it for something so I slip it in my pocket.

Scorched, dehydrated and knackered, I get back to the car to find that the lock has seized up and I have to climb in the passenger side. (Plus ça change – I once had a Ford Capri whose driver's door fell off completely, so let's be grateful for small mercies.) By this time I feel like calling it a day, but there is another sacred landscape at Uley which needs homage paid to it. This is one you won't find on the maps; it is hidden. Or to be more precise, it is so open you can't pin it down to any focused location. The whole hillside is implicated.

Uley Bury

The surface story goes like this. Between Uley Bury and Hetty Pegler's Tump is an east-facing slope called West Hill. A Romano-Celtic Temple of Mercury once stood on the top of this slope, the remains of which came to light during 1970s drainage pipe manoeuvres, close to the road and within view of Hetty Pegler. A subsequent excavation recovered its decapitated statue, now in the British Museum. It also turned up a substantial scatter of cursing tablets. These tablets, similar to the ones famously found in the Temple of Sulis in Bath, solicit the help of the Roman god in kicking the arse, literally or metaphorically, of an assortment of petty thieves and snotty neighbours. "I ask you that you drive them to the greatest death," one bloke petitions as a fate for three named individuals "who have brought evil harm on my beast". A chap called Biccus, a victim of theft, requests that the thief "may not urinate nor defecate nor speak nor sleep nor stay awake nor [have] well-being or health, unless he bring (the stolen item) in the temple of Mercury". The indictment was scratched into the surface of a small sheet of flattened lead, then folded up and tossed into a sacred well; the temple at Uley is thought to have had a pool in the middle for this purpose. Nearly all the curses here relate to thefts: of livestock, clothing, or household items, and in an age when there was no police force or criminal justice system, a good old zap from the Punitive Ray was probably the most realistic chance of getting redress.

I'm not a fan of cursing (despite my involvement in quasi-witchery I don't believe there is ever, under any circumstances, any justification for it) and neither am I a huge fan of the Romans, whose culture and remains give me no great spiritual connection. But what draws me to this site is that its sanctity goes so far back in time, the ranting Romans are actually little more than a flash of noonday sun on this sacred hillside. There was a temple here thousands of years before Mercury ever shook his curly locks and wiggly staff on these shores.

Given that there is now no visible trace of the temple on West Hill, it remains for the imagination to visualise the scale of it. There was a large complex here by the first century AD – lots of buildings, including accommodation, shops and bogs. But the archaeologists found traces of a Neolithic enclosure around the temple site, dating the shrine back a further two thousand years. A previously unknown round barrow was discovered (ploughed flat and now invisible) by the roadside. They also did a magnetometer survey over an area some way beyond the excavation site and found extensive and varied soil disturbance, too jumbled to interpret, which suggested an active presence in this place over a wide area and long timescale (Woodward & Leach, 1993).

My purpose today is not to find the physical location of the temple, but to attune to the landscape that held it. I want to know why the Neolithic people, the barrow-builders who made Hetty Pegler's Tump, chose this place as their shrine. I want to know what native deity or genius loci presided over this place and what traces it has scratched through the ethers.

The starting point for this is selected: a footpath down through Toney Wood. I just want to follow my instincts and not plan out this walk. Climbing by necessity out of the wrong side of the car, I take a left fork through the woods and soon find myself squelching through the mud of not-quite-evident springs.

It's really hard to describe the ambience of Toney Wood. It's Otherworldly to the point of feeling unreal – almost hallucinatory in its strangeness. It's not at all like the usual Gloucestershire faery woods, and is altogether more awesome – in the true sense of inspiring awe. Mildly unsettling too, but more because of its raw power than any focus of malevolence. It's a very old, mature wood and the trees are tall, which wipes out a lot of the light. The sun's orb dazzles the upper canopies but the pathway is dim. All around there are sounds of movement: branches sway, twigs crack. I'm most definitely not alone here.

This wood has a feel of being simultaneously immutable and in a constant state of change. The pathway cuts alongside a steep bank whose earth face is draped with old ivy and yet freshly crumbling away its layers, ever revealing. Looking at the fresh tumbles of red earth and pale stone I have a sense that if I so much as touch this surface it will fall away and expose the bones of the long dead, or other traces of old things hidden inside. I try to align my senses with the underlying layers, the resonance of a native spirit of place.

The logical assumption is that the pre-Roman deity must have had similar attributes to Mercury, since that's who replaced him (or her). But not necessarily. Stephen Yeates in his book A Dreaming for the Witches notes that the temple on West Hill was aligned so that the rising sun would stream through the entrance and illuminate the statue of Mercury on certain days in late April and early May, almost corresponding to the feast of Mercury on May 15th. From this he suggests that Mercury was chosen as the replacement god not because he had similar attributes to the local deity, but because he occupied an equivalent feast day (which may have been on or near Beltane). This rings fairly true to me, seeing as how Christianity subsequently superimposed itself on the native faith by subsuming its feast-days. I also read somewhere that the pre-Roman Uley shrine had been connected with the stag-god Cernunnos. Can I detect any feel of Cernunnos-vibes here, I wonder, as I descend through the sloping woods? At that moment there is a loud crackle of breaking twigs to my left and a swish of movement, and I turn to see a large deer pelting away through the trees.

The path presents me with choices. I try to follow intuitions, and one time when I take a path based on rational sense rather than instinct, a voice in my head says "wrong way! go back!" Following this imposed course I venture into the adjacent copse, Ring Wood. Heading towards sunlight and the green of a field glimpsed through the trees, I find the place I have been meant to discover. A thick mossy drystone wall holds back the forest, and on its other side is a low drop into a semicircular enclosure. From this circle of tree-ringed ground a stream emerges and chuckles away down the hillside. An old iron-barred stile, almost hidden, allows entry.

The alder tree above the spring. One well-head rises under the roots of this tree, the other can be seen emerging from the ground top right.

This is indeed a sacred spot. Admittedly it doesn't look that exciting, and its main use in these secular times is for cattle, as a drinking hole and occasional toilet. The enclosure is a squelching mire of their footprints, in deceptively deep mud. Tree roots weave the surface, which is spread with stone tumble, flat limestone bricks. A few bits of plastic litter and an old car tyre add a touch of modern decor. But on inner levels we have something special here. It is a double spring, a two-headed source. These are polarised, active and passive. One spring ripples straight out of the open ground, its current pulsing against the palm of my hand. The other emerges from a crease in the ground under the roots of an alder tree, and although it produces water at a similar rate, appears placid and completely motionless. In fact it took me a while to realise it was a spring because at its source it appears not to be flowing at all. A few yards from the twin springs the waters blend together and make a little stream, polarised unity.

Was this double-spring ever revered as a sacred place? Who knows. It's quite some distance from the temple complex, but then this whole area was in a sense a part of the temple, and there's no knowing which of the many springs on this hillside, if any, were singled out for special attention. I can't even be sure whether this double-headed flow existed in ancient time: some springs dry up over time, while others newly reveal themselves. But in recognition of this being a special place now, solitary, penannular and cowtrodden, I offer my piece of rainbow-sheened glass among the stones of its bed.

The "active" spring emerges from the earth.

If the atmosphere in Toney Wood was a little bit unsettling, I have to say there is a similar tension about this place. The polar spring itself is naturally buoyant, but there's something overlaid on the top, a thinly netted veil laid on the field. A little of its exuberance is stifled by this dusky web. Perhaps this negative tension is only to be expected in a place where people have pinned their curses, even if this isn't the cursing well itself. The Romans went in for cursing in a big way, but whether the practice of cursing has an older lineage in Uley, who knows. As far as I know there's no evidence that earlier peoples practised it, which is not to say that they didn't. It is, of course, perfectly possible that they did so without the relative permanence of inscribed lead. Perhaps a veneer of negativity on this place is inevitable.

I move on, down the slope into the sunlight, following the course of the young stream. The Ordnance Survey shows a footpath here, but there is none: a little used public right of way which leaves no track. The terrain is difficult as the cows' feet have left treacherous hollows under the grass; I have to reroute myself a little way into the field to avoid a twisted ankle.

The cattle are clustering. They move en masse to a scrape of bare earth in an adjacent field – another spring. I decide not to explore this one as it's on private property. But the terrain of many wells is clear.

And then I hear the sound of rapid sploshing water close by. Another circle of earth, hollowed and muddied and shaded by a ring of trees, but while the double-spring was presided over by alder, this one has a guardian of thorn. White may-blossom nods in the shade. Energies are feminine, and waters splurge. I can't get close to the spring itself but I can see it. Waters pouring from a gap, not in the flatness of the earth like the previous springs, but in a small vertical bank, straight from the tangled rootball of a hawthorn. The stream from the double-spring meanders in a reverent circle around it before meeting with its waters lower down. If there is a sacred well in this field, then this is surely it. Its powers flow forth, a gushing spark undiminished by nettles, barbed wire and the smell of biodegrading dung.

A small bridge takes me over the stream and into a sunny field, where my path is immediately sliced off by an electric fence right across the footpath. A short tube of hosepipe hangs on the wire, presumably to discourage hapless ramblers from blundering into the fence without seeing it. And perhaps to provide a zap-free passing place. I contemplate this obstacle. Under or over? Not ideal either way. On balance I decide to go for the undignified shimmy, and find myself for the second time today slithering along the grass on my front.

From here it's not easy. The electric fence scores an artificial ring within the meadow, and I can't get back to the woods. The only obvious footpath leads to the farm in the valley, in completely the wrong direction. I choose to forge my own path around the field edges, back up the hill towards the wood, hoping for an opening when I get there. Knee high grass and buttercups. English meadow magic. Marred by a distant warning as a tractor two fields away begins to creep towards me. Having strayed from the authorised track I now fear a bollocking.

Hogging the headlands I struggle up the hill. Grass becomes waist-high, buzzing with pollen, surging through umbelliferous blossoms and the squish of underfoot springs. That this hillside is a whorl of springs I already knew; the satellite image on Google Streetview shows the hidden watercourses as cropmarks, a tangle of meandering serpent outlines scotched in the grass. I reach the edge of the wood, but there is no way in. Threefold barbed wire lines the boundary. The electric fence, the farmer's curse, strings through the tall grasses.

And then a merciful stile appears, and I'm into the cool of the woods. Too knackered now to get back up the slope. Light-headed and struggling to breathe, but the strangeness of Toney Wood offers little respite. I sense the antiquity of the track, hauling me into its time loop. So I sit down on its bank to catch my breath, and watch the shining ones dance in their hall among the trees. Their floor level is below the ground of the present forest. I'm an outside observer acknowledging their music and colour. And then I move on, because if I rest here too long I probably won't be able to get up again.

I am, as it happens, just a few yards from the Romano-Celtic temple, invisible though it is beneath the ploughsoil. But the temple site is just a hub. Out from its core spins the weaving of a sacred landscape, where every twig carries the tremors of its weft.


Sources:
Bord, Janet, Cursing not Curing: The Darker Side of Holy Wells (article available online)
Woodward, Ann, and Leach, Peter, The Uley Shrines: Excavation of a ritual complex on West Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire 1977-9 (English Heritage, 1993).
Yeates, Stephen, A Dreaming for the Witches: A Recreation of the Dobunni Primal Myth (Oxbow, 2009).
Several pages about Uley on Curse Tablets from Roman Britain website.

Wyche Cutting

Topical weathervane on the bus shelter at the Wyche Cutting, Malvern.

The Wyche is a notch or cleft on the crown of the Malvern Hills, straddling the border between Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It can be seen from miles away as a cleft in the long line of undulations and it marks an important crossing point. It's one of only two places where you can drive over the top of the Malverns rather than having to go all the way round the perimeter, although it is steep and bendy and something of a white knuckle ride in an ancient 1.0 litre VW Polo.

The pass over the hills as it appears today owes a fair bit to the Victorian road-improvers, and some of the tumps and bumps are the remains of spoil heaps from their digging endeavours. But the Wyche pass is ancient – known to have been in use in prehistoric times and to have formed part of a neolithic trade route, used amongst other things for the transportation of salt from Droitwich to South Wales. A small village occupies the high ground on either side of the hill, and a village green bounded by the intriguingly named Fossil Bank.

A special feature of the Malvern hills is the proliferation of roadside springs, spouts and wells – some drinkable, some dry – some sacred, some rancid. The Wyche Cutting has several, bringing together the symbolism of a cleft in the hills with a water-bearing cleft in the earth. They come in a variety of forms but are often at their most interesting on 1st May, when they are "dressed" with flowers and flags as part of a revival tradition.

The Wyche Spring (below) bears the distinction, apparently, of being the highest well on the Malvern ridge – a moot point really, as the flow has been shut off for some twenty years, possibly amid concerns of pollution. The spout is totally dry and in this Beltane well-dressing a twist of blue cellophane has been used to recreate the tumbling waters. The spring that feeds (or used to feed) this roadside water spout rises beside a cottage at the edge of the Wyche Cutting and reaches it through a pipe under the road. Unlike most of the springs and wells on the Malverns, which consist of rainwater squeezed through geological faults, the Wyche Spring is from a true underground watercourse, an Archaean spring.

Here be the Willow Spring (below), only a few yards down the road on the other side, with its May Day dressing. The well doesn't look very much but it's one of the genuinely ancient Malvern springs. The water originally poured straight out of a cleft in the rock beside a willow tree, a proper sacred spring of the kind that opens into the underworld, for those that know how to look. The water was once fast-flowing, so much so that it was something of a hazard in winter, when the gushing abundance flowed over the road and froze into a sheet of solid ice – which is no joke on this stretch of road with its steep slope. An engraving of 1855 shows a very rustic scene with a willow tree growing out over the road at an angle and the waters pouring from the top of a boulder at the roadside. Although still rural, the scene is quite different today. For one thing, the flow is reduced to a piddly little dribble, enough to cultivate a small crop of moss but not much use for anything else.

This is because the spring was damaged during WW2 by a bomb which landed close to it, and has not flowed properly since. Malvern springs are extremely sensitive to disturbance and it's not unusual for them to stop flowing properly if the ground around them is interfered with. The waters pass through layers of impervious pre-Cambrian rock whose alignments are very precise. The springs consist of rainwater which soaks into the hills and is filtered through minutely fine fissures in the rock, so tightly pressed together that even minerals and bacteria are unable to pass through the gaps, resulting in a water which is incredibly pure and essentially has nothing in it. It's a very delicate balance and if the rocks take a thumping the fissures can become so tight the waters can't get through them any more.

The Willow Spring was reconstructed in 1946 following the bomb damage, and set into a little stone enclosure. Its pootling trickle falls into a stone basin and into the earth through a simple soakaway under the ground. Because of this lack of proper drainage, it was decided during recent restoration not to undertake further work to improve the flow of the spring, for fear of causing icy overflow on the winter road. And so a dribble it remains. The willow tree is gone. So is the magic. Whether it's because of the bomb damage or whether it's just me, I can't sense any of the inner dynamics I would normally expect to find at a sacred well of such provenance.

Down below the road on the steep slope of the hillside is a place where the real magic flows. You won't find it named or signposted, but you might find it if you follow the sound of chuckling water.

Nature's well-dressing: Beltane flowers deck an abandoned spring.

A small stream emerges from a mossy spout in the side of the hill and splashes into the pebble-gulley it's traced out for itself. The spout is most likely the outflow from the abandoned spring which formerly served the Royal Malvern Well Spa, long vanished, crumbled under ivy, its presence deleted. The flow from this spring is much greater than that of the two roadside wells round the corner, but its opening is hidden. It lies to the side of a footpath below the road and in its lushness it can only be found by listening to the tumbling of its water through the stones and weeds. Nobody "dresses" this spring at Beltane, but it dresses itself in the colours of the wild weeds and garden escapes. A radiant sky-blue trickles down its far side from a clump of forget-me-nots, a domestic cultivar gone feral and rejoicing in the marshy soil, fronded with fern and eyes of herb robert, green nettles and dusky watermint, tangles of buttercups and golden saxifrage. In the wooded shade of the footpath another garden escape, tissue-fine Iceland poppies, catch the shafts of the sun in translucent crêpe, a flaming orange.

As the spring makes its way down the hill so the footpath follows in parallel, down a dappled corridor to a wooden stile where the bluebell woods meet an open green, giving way to a break in the trees where blue takes over. In the wood shade it's the royal earth blue, the saturated colour of pendular bells, and in the sunlit grass it's an astral faery light, radiant blue on a green wave.

And so the path opens out into a meadow, where a solitary oak tree roots into the ancestral pitch and ancient memories flame the grass.

 The Wyche oak, hub of the meadow.

Sources:
Aquae Malvernensis: The Springs and Fountains of the Malvern Hills by Cora Weaver and Bruce Osborne (private publication, 1994)
The website of the Malvern Spa Association