Lady’s well: Reclaiming the holy waters of Northumberland
A mini pilgrimage to Northumberland's holiest well.
It feels like there’s so much I could say since I last wrote here, so much I want to say – not least about the woods that held me after a huge loss recently, and I will definitely come back to them and more later.
But for now, I want to share with you my experiences of Northumberland’s most “famous” holy well.
Why “famous”? Because, having lived in this part of the world for almost 40 years, I only first heard whispers of the well a few years ago and even then didn’t really know anything about it until last month when crime writer LJ Ross published a book entitled Lady’s Well, inspiring my crime fiction-reading mum to go off and research.
And so it was that one quiet November Sunday I set off on an 90 minute-long adventure Northwards to check out Lady’s Well for myself.
The Holy wells
Of course, when I refer to this well as holy, I’m under no illusions that it’s not the only one.
We know that in days gone by the waters that spilled up from deep caverns in the land were considered to be holy – just look at the Red and White Springs of Glastonbury as prime examples of that which last even today.
Author and Jungian analyst Marion Woodman spoke of these holy wells as symbols of our own inner journeys; the way that they led down from the surface world into the deep treasures of darkness and the feminine consciousness that could be found there; while many have written and spoken about the women who tended to and guarded those holy wells as being amongst the wisest and most well respected of priestesses.
All of which made me even more fascinated by the name Lady’s Well and all that represented – even outside of the limited amount of information about its history that could be found online.
Finding the well
I lie in a pretty small body of land and one with a decent road network (thanks Elen of the Ways!); enough so that a journey less than two hours up the road wouldn’t usually justify its own section of a blog post. But this one was a little different.
You see, as soon as I turned off the main road – a road I’ve driven countless times before over the years – a fog descended from out of nowhere. And not just any fog, but the kind of thick white mist that left me unable to clearly see the very front of my car, never mind the road ahead. And though I’m no stranger to driving in extreme weather conditions, this was by far the thickest fog I’d ever experienced in a car. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen fog like it was at the top of Glastonbury Tor, a sacred Goddess site in its own right that is well-known for the mists which descend and are said to hide the Tor from prying eyes.
As if that weren’t quite enough, five minutes after the fog arrived, my car beeped to tell me that my tyres had lost pressure. Not just one tyre though, dear reader, but ALL FOUR! Out of nowhere, what are the chances?!
So there I was, driving incredibly slowly and cautiously along a quiet country lane, unable to pull over thanks to the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, with a good ten miles to go until I reached my destination when the fog suddenly lifted…
… For just long enough to show me the body of a deer lying in the road. Of course, I was in the countryside, and the bodies of animals can often be seen along the sides of the road. But, without going into too much upsetting detail, the way that the fog lifted and this deer was placed so clearly in front of me felt incredibly potent; particularly since the fog descended again right afterwards, putting me back into my small, carefully driven bubble for the final part of the journey.
The home of the well
Lady’s Well itself is located a short walk from a little village called Holystone, and though I didn’t explore the village too deeply, what I did see were old stone buildings gathered around a street that was so quiet on a mid-Sunday morning that I found myself wondering if everyone was still asleep.
There were definitely people living there though, as I learned when I made my way down the track signposted towards Lady’s Well and out into the field that stood between me and the well itself.
Living here in Northumberland I sometimes think I’m spoiled when it comes to countryside scenery, and this field was a prime example of exactly that – the kind of scenery I too often take for granted, so need to step back from at times and remind myself to pause and look again at how beautiful it was.
As I began to walk up the very muddy track through the field and alongside Holystone Burn a friendly shout ran out from my side, and I noticed a woman waving to me from her back garden as she hung washing out to dry. It sounds strange – after all, this was only a local resident saying hello to someone walking in her village which is pretty normal here in the North East – but I felt my heart swell as I waved and called back to her. It was almost as though this woman’s blessing turned my walk from a simple adventure to a short pilgrimage. And though that made no sense at the time, later realisation that the back garden she was waving from was on part of the land that was once the old Canoness priory made the experience so much more potent!
And in fact, while the well is the place that has been deemed holy, the whole path through that field had such a powerful energy that I could feel this was once a pilgrimage route. Before I saw a sign for the well further down the road, I was convinced that the small fenced-off garden to the side of the path was actually the sacred spot I was headed for. That’s definitely a place that needs more investigation further down the line.
But for now, let’s talk about the well itself.
The story we’re told
The story goes that Lady’s Well was once a simple ancient spring, which became popular after the Romans built a road out to the Northumbrian coast which ran right by it, making this the perfect watering spot for travellers on their way and eventually leading the Romans to place a wall around the well to turn it into a small pool.
It rose to particular prominent thanks to St Ninian, a Scottish bishop who is linked to numerous wells beside Roman roads across Northumberland having travelled around this area as he sought to convert and baptise the locals into Christianity. And in fact, in those early days (Ninian died in AD432) it was re-named St Ninian’s Well in his honour.
The name didn’t stick too long though since St Paulinus was the next one to attach himself to the well. Paulinus was a Roman bishop who arrived in Northumbria with Æthelburg when she headed North to marry King Edwin. Paulinus’ mission was to convert some of those heathen Northumbrians to Christianity and my gods did he do that! It’s said that Paulinus baptised over 3,000 Northumbrians in one week in AD627 and where did he do it? Right here in this very well of course!
Not only did that lead to the well being renamed as St Paulinus’ well, but much later it led to a 15th-century statue of St Paulinus being transported almost 20 miles from Alnwick Castle to sit first in the centre of the well’s pool and later overlooking the pool (although on the day I visited he was nowhere to be seen – more on that later), and the “holy stone” Paulinus is said to have knelt on to baptise the locals being turned into an altar at the site and giving its name to the nearby village.
But those two saints are both men, right? Well perhaps not, but that’s a story for later too! So for now, where did the name “lady’s” well come from?
Around 1107, a small Augustinian priory was founded in the nearby village, bringing between six and eight canonesses to the area at any one time. The group was entirely dedicated to the Virgin Mary and were eventually given ownership of the holy well and its grounds as their own share of the local land grew, turning this beautiful grove into a place of contemplation and prayer to the lady herself. Unfortunately the priory was demolished as part of the reformation in 1541 when stone from the buildings was used to create homes and other buildings in the village of Holystone.
But even as the priory was demolished, and once revered holy wells across Britain fell into disrepair and neglect, Lady’s Well continued to be honoured, not only as the source of water for the nearby village but also as a holy place. Even the large Celtic cross you see in the image below wasn’t too recent, being added to the site during Victorian times, and a further wall being added around the pool later in the 20th century to keep local animals out!
This leads us to the well as it stands today.
What I found
When I arrived in the small walled grove that houses Lady’s Well, the first thing that struck me was just how incredibly peaceful it was. Even as a hefty wind blew in the field outside of the wall, the land inside was incredibly peaceful with only the odd flurry of Autumn leaves twirling down from the trees.
For all of the cross in the centre, the walls around the pool and the garden and the National Trust stewardship, this was a space in which the sacredness of nature could be seen, heard, and felt in every possible way.
As I walked around the pool I felt the energies of so many that had come before me; not only those who had revered this place as part of the new religion, not only those weary travellers who had once celebrated this source of water as they made their way out to the coast and to the sacred isle that waited there but also those whose belief system and connection could be found so much deeper.
I saw those who had lived so far before and would visit this beautiful piece of land not only as a source of water, but also as a doorway to the underworld, and as a source of the sacred nectar that flowed from those lands.
I saw those who would visit here long after you and I have passed from this world, in a time when the true sacredness of this spot and so many others like it was truly recognised and revered once again, and felt their energies around me as they looked to me – to all of us – as ancestors of the traditions they will create out of all our generations are building.
And I saw and felt those who come there at night when the humans are tucked away in their homes and the spirits of nature are free to roam safely once again, as I know they once did in this beautiful piece of land. And interestingly, one such being even seemed to show up on a video I took of this beautiful place, appearing to me as a small tree stump on the morning itself, but moving its head and hand in the video I shared with friends and family members so clearly that my ever practical mum even spotted it!
This is a place that is sacred. Its waters were those of cleansing and emergence, its land was that of meditative peace and connection, and its trees – my gods its trees – were those that once formed a gateway onto the path of initiation.
And though the Christians may have claimed it as their own – even placing their own stone markers onto the site and into its waters over time – their tradition was only the latest in a long, long line to try and harness space and energy that bypassed any individual gods and teachings and was innately sacred.
This place is magic, just as the questions it had raised for me from day one had suggested.
What were those questions?
Before I leave you with my images of Lady’s Well, allow me to share with you the one word that really drove me to visit this place at all: Ninian.
Yes, the name of the saint I shared with you earlier in the story. But also a word I was familiar with long before I ever heard of the saint – as one of the given names of the Arthurian Lady of the Lake.
If you’re not familiar with the Lady of the Lake (also known as Nimue, Vivianne, and a number of other names) let’s pause for a moment so I can share a synopsis of her story. The Lady of the Lake was one of the highest priestesses of Avalon schooled in both the old mysteries and the ways of the fae folk and said, depending on which version of the story you read, to be either the lover or the captor of the great sorcerer Merlin in the Arthurian Legends. It is said she was the sorceress and guardian of the lake at Avalon – now known as Glastonbury Tor – who was not only the mother or step-mother of the knight Lancelot but also took care of the great mystical sword Excalibur between kings.
Which is why, upon the death of King Arthur, it is said that the Lady of the Lake’s hand rose up from the waters of Avalon and took hold of his sword, carrying it back to the depths to await the land’s next great leader. Meanwhile, Ninian herself rose from the waters to join three other priestesses of Avalon – among them Arthur’s sister Morgan La Fae – to tend to a dying Arthur and steer the boat that would transport him across the water and into the otherworld.
There are those who believe that Ninian was a villain of the Arthurian legends – trapping Merlin in a cave so that she can be the prime sorcerer and advisor to the king; and others still who say that the Lady of the Lake didn’t exist at all and was simply a misgendering of the Saint and prolific baptiser. But you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I entirely disagree with them.
Actually, there’s no official record that the Scottish saint was actually called Ninian. As Flint F. Johnston suggests, original stories of that saint call him Uinniau, a name which spawned many place names throughout Scotland and beyond. He only took the name of Ninian (or Nynia) later when scribes such as Bede wrote down his story, and given that he would occasionally retreat to a cave known as Saint Ninian’s, it’s possible that he took his later name from the cave rather than the other way around.
You may well be thinking it’s quite the stretch to connect the high priestess and keeper of the sacred waters of Avalon to a sacred well hundreds of miles further North. But let’s not forget what we’ve already learned from our adventures with the hidden magic of Northumberland; the old kingdom of Bernicia was very deeply connected to the Welsh lands which back then included Avalon; so much so that Morgan La Fae – Avalonian priestess in her own right and sister of the great king – married the King of Bernicia and likely made her home at what is now Bamburgh.
And so, when Arthur died and the sacred lands of Avalon fell to invaders who were unsympathetic to the old ways and mysteries, wouldn’t it make sense for many of the priestesses of that region to head North to a land they knew would be safe and welcoming?
And though Lady’s Well is some 40 miles South West from Bamburgh, it is one of the safest and most supportive spaces I’ve found so far on my journeys with this land and carries such beautifully potent energy that can only really be called magical. I can absolutely understand why the Lady of the Lake would have been drawn to tend this place, this water, and this sacred grove.
More than that, I can understand why a small community of these priestesses who moved from Avalon to Bernicia would have set up home close by and tended this place as the ritual space it was always meant to be. And though we know only of the Christian community of women that lived there from 1107 to 1541, I know for certain that wise and connected women have been gathering in this place for much, much longer.
I could write about Lady’s Well forever – and will undoubtedly write more since I very much plan to visit again. But for now, almost 3,000 words is more than enough to share and so I’ll leave you with this, the photographs I took of this beautiful, powerful spot.