Sacred Welsh Waters

SACRED WELSH WATERS

Smashwords Edition

© Chris J Thomas 2005, 2011

Published and edited by: Paul D.E. Mitchell

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Introduction

Whenever the phrase ‘ancient monument’ appears in a book or during the course of a conversation, most of us take for granted we know what they refer to.

Wales, like several other parts of the British Isles, has its fair share of them - some would say considerably more so. Great castles tower on crags or guard important river crossings. Strange unnatural mounds mark the sites of wooden stockades and earthworks where brutality, conflict and sudden death were common visitors.

Stone circles stand in places our ancient ancestors and predecessors revered and where they worshipped their gods. Lonely monoliths brood timeless in their solitary indifference to the petty affairs of Man. Tumuli, cromlechs, hill forts and other traces of primitive native civil engineering litter the Welsh landscape.

Preservation being the fashionable order of the day, many are now being made accessible to the public. Yet there is one type of ancient monument which is almost ignored - except by those who really possess a true sense of affinity with the history of their country.

Perhaps because they are invariably small in size, they are not considered as worthy of preservation or promotion as the larger and more traditional tourist attractions but they should never be overlooked nor deemed unimportant in any way.

The Rev E. J. Newell, M.A. put it beautifully in his excellent 1895 publication ‘The History of the Welsh Church’. Although he was referring to inscribed stones, his sentiment applies to our sacred waters: ‘Familiarity often breeds a measure of contempt and they are not always treated with that veneration which such precious and sacred monuments of antiquity deserve.’

Yet the grander and more obvious monuments are mere infants in the time-scale of human history. Those under discussion in this book, even though all traces of human involvement may have disappeared, pre-date them by thousands of years - in many cases probably right back to the time our wary forefathers crept northwards following the retreating ice.

These are old enough but they're still juveniles compared to some of the incredibly ancient sites found in South Wales and the West Country as the British Ice Cap never covered this area. Although tundra conditions must have existed in the Gower peninsular and the Vale of Glamorgan, these sites were probably being used by early Man during the last Ice Age.

These are the really ancient monuments and whether you call them ‘well-shrines’ or ‘sacred springs’, they provided the most basic necessity for subsistence: water. These prehistoric settlements were often totally dependent upon these water sources and many of them remained in use into the twentieth century.

Indeed, a lot of Welsh villages and towns owe their locations to these water sources so they had a profound influence on the current population distribution of Wales. Even today, a significant number of farms, isolated houses and communities still depend upon them - but their intrinsic importance is far greater than that.

Man, in common with all other living things on this planet, is constructed mainly of water. There are other bits and pieces mixed in, of course, to hold the lot together - carbon, various trace elements and a hefty helping of mystery - but water constitutes the bulk. Perhaps this fact goes a long way towards explaining one particular aspect of Man's complex nature.

Man has always been martyr to a fascination with water far over and above his need for it to survive: thronging the hot summer beaches; messing about in boats; sliding down the waves on bits of plank; catching fish for sport. Wherever there is a convenient bit of water, you will always find representatives of our species enthusiastically pleasuring themselves with whatever aquatic activity grabs them; be it bobbing about in a rubber-ring or tearing around on jet-skis.

Okay, that takes care of the recreational use to which we put water, but deep-down (metaphorically speaking) water means a lot more to us than that - what of its spiritual aspect?

We may stand in awe of the destructive power of the sea in all its fury and delight in the grandeur of torrent-filled gorges and great cataracts, yet these visible proofs of the strength of Nature are not particularly conducive to the quiet spiritual introspection one can find in contemplation of our sacred Welsh waters.

Water has always been associated with the concept of purity especially as an aspect of the divine - so it is only natural, therefore, that Man's eternal interest in the supernatural would lead him to assign deities, spirits and magical properties to theses quiet sustainers of life.

Early settlers sought water at its purest - as it emerges from the ground. These sacred water sources were given enormous significance by unnumbered generations of our ancestors and so seeded, the author argues, the most rudimentary and primeval religions on Earth.

~~~~~

Water from the ground is obtained from two main sources. There are wells and there are springs. Both are primary providers of fresh and (hopefully) uncontaminated water. But there is a fundamental difference between the two:

Wells are man-made artefacts; narrow pits or shafts usually dug into the ground in an attempt to gain access to water. Ordinary domestic water-wells of the simple shaft type are found mostly in flat, arid areas of the world where rivers and streams are far apart and the only available fresh water must be drawn up in a bucket from a hole dug into the ground. Underlying rock strata tends to act as a natural filter, thus ensuring the purity of the water as long as the water-table supplies the well.

Older properties in the less hilly areas of Britain - even those built on the banks of rivers - would use shaft wells as surface water could be foul or even absent during summer. Similarly, winter floodwaters would turn rivers and streams brown with suspended sediment and ordure or it would be dangerous to access rivers and lakes if they were covered with ice.

These deep shaft wells are generally reliable and safe for drinking because their very depth and darkness usually inhibits the growth of noxious algae and they only dry up if the water table becomes too depleted to rise above the bottom of the shaft in which case the well shaft would have to be deepened.

Shallower water sources where natural springs are impounded by geography or man-made structures are classed as ‘wells’ but they can be contaminated by plants, algae and other microscopic livestock due to their constant exposure to sunlight.

Springs are outflowings of water found where a valley or gully intersects a layer of impervious rock exposing porous water-bearing strata. If this strata happens to be relatively level, springs emerge at intervals along the valley side or hillside to form a distinct ‘spring line.’

When rain falls upon the land surface a certain proportion will always sink in rather than run off directly into a stream and gravity will ensure it continues to trickle down until it reaches a layer of harder or denser rock. No matter how impervious this layer may be, pressure and folding will create myriads of cracks and cavities through which the water can reach still lower previous levels. It has been asserted that in some geographical areas, millions of years may pass before a rain drop will see the light of day once more.

A shaft well driven through an impervious layer to reach the water-bearing rock is known as an artesian well after the Artois region of France. If the layers of surrounding water-bearing strata are higher than the well they are connected to, hydrostatic pressure may force the water to the surface creating an artificial spring and maybe even a fountain if the pressure is high enough.

Most naturally emerging water along a spring-line will seep out slowly beneath the subsoil and only where larger volumes of water reach the surface at a single point can this be truly called a proper spring. In dry summers most of the water flow in even the largest of British rivers is sustained by these reliable springs – seen and unseen - which gives some indication of how numerous and important they are.

In Wales, there are many natural springs which have been built around for a definite purpose at some time or other to create a ‘well’ but not all of them are at the point where the water emerges though. Saint Peris' Well (Ffynnon Beris) and St Mary's Well (Ffynnon Fair) have been excavated and retained some little distance from the actual spring to avoid the boggy ground around them.

There are even a couple of cases where a pool in a river has been dubbed a ‘well’ simply because some noted person or other happened to settle down there and left his or her name to mark the spot.

This, then, is the essential difference between wells and springs for the purposes of this book.

~~~~~

Long before history began to be recorded, waters issuing from the ground were undoubtedly looked upon with some respect if only for the reason that many tasted a lot better than the river water - especially during hot summers. Spring water is generally a lot colder than in the streams among the Welsh mountains too, as many an overheated hill walker will testify.

Thus the earliest permanent camps and settlements tended to be established on high, easily defended sites close to plentiful supplies of sweet and unpolluted water throughout the year. In those days, river valleys were invariably swampy and choked with vegetation making access difficult besides providing ideal conditions and opportunities for ambushes.

It probably was not long before these springs began to be endowed with some sort of religious or supernatural significance aeons before organised religions appeared on the scene. They had practical uses too, besides an assured supply of the wet stuff.

It has been suggested that newly-born babies were immediately plunged into the cold waters at such sites both for the purpose of cleansing them after birth and to ensure they were healthy enough to survive and properly serve the tribe. Weaklings or the sickly would very likely perish at the shock of being suddenly immersed like this and their demise would avoid them possibly becoming a drain on the tribe's resources as they grew older.

The author often wonders if this practice was the forerunner of baptism – the cruel but practical ritual gradually evolving into the familiar modern and solemn religious ceremony of purification.

Over time the significance and ceremonial use of the more popular springs would have evolved. Prisoners were tortured and butchered on their banks. The messily-detached heads of tribal enemies were bathed in the sacred water as a token of respect for the defeated.

Some of the larger springs (e.g. St Winifred's, Ilston, etc) could have been used for drowning vanquished enemies in the same way as the famed Mayan ‘drowning wells’ or cenotes which are usually sinkholes, some of enormous size, containing groundwater.

It is fascinating to speculate what was life was like as the great ice caps retreated - it is perhaps not too far fetched to speculate that a battle could have been followed by the Stone Age equivalent of a knees-up and a barbecue – only serving up prime roast enemy rather than burgers. Disputes within the tribe were often settled by bloody conflict beside the spring and sacrifices to local gods and spirits were carried out there.

Human nature being what it is some form of tribal one-upmanship would ensure a certain amount of bragging to outsiders would take place about the powers of the local spring. This would naturally be encouraged (or even instigated) by the resident shaman as a sure-fire way of augmenting his or her assumed powers. Usually the outflow was regarded as owning the same value as the water in the spring, whether medicinal or spiritual.

The author believes that being in charge of a sacred spring was bound to have conferred a position of high status to the priest, druid or shaman and must have been a lot safer than aspiring to the chieftainship with all the fighting, scars and paranoia that would entail.

Most of the wells and springs identified as having a title can safely be assumed to have obtained their initial reputation during prior to the Roman invasion and evidence of this is often suggested by the close proximity of other sacred sites such as stone circles, monoliths, tumuli and burial mounds.

Water is so fundamental to life it that it was regarded as one of the four basic elements upon which early worship was based; the others being fire, earth and wind. Springs, streams, rivers and lakes were all revered to the extent that local deities and gods were associated with them and even the Romans adopted and incorporated many of these local deities into their local pantheons.

With the exception of springs, it is just as likely that the availability of fish and edible water plants would have been the primary attractions of most other waters in the old days. Lakes and wells were also believed to be possible portals into (and out of) the underworld and form a thread in many Celtic Myths which even emerge in the later Arthurian sagas.

It is only too easy to imagine the evolution of the mystique and possibly bloody ritual surrounding springs where each tribe would attempt to outdo their neighbours with wild claims based upon imagined or contrived evidence - the primitive ancestors of advertising agencies, some might say.

Even up until the time of the Industrial Revolution several Welsh healing springs, impounded to form surface wells, were looked after by a keeper who was usually female and often referred to as the ‘priestess’ or ‘guardian’ of the spring. Ffynnon Non near St David’s had one and so did Ffynnon Eilan on Anglesey and Ffynnon Elian near Colwyn Bay.

When a well became popular, for whatever reason, it was usually turned into a paying concern for the benefit of the local Parish. A respected elder of the locality would normally be selected for this job. Duties tended to be light - keeping watch against unauthorised use, covering the water outlet at night and acting as cashier for offerings from visitors. Several examples of this are given later in the book.

It cannot be disputed that some degree of our pagan ancestry lurks within all of us no matter how impregnable our outward veneer of civilisation may appear to be. One only has to look at what is going on in various parts of the world today to realise how superficial this veneer really is.

For all our assumed sophistication we, as a race, are not really all that far removed from our earliest wild-eyed forebears to whom might was right and if you can't join 'em, beat 'em. As a result, springs (or wells) still hold an influence over many of us which can only satisfactorily be explained by assuming some sort of race-memory is in operation.

Time passed. Invaders came, sometimes leaving their mark with artefacts, more often just stirring the gene pool for relaxation between bouts of the more serious business of battle and pillage, with few other traces of their existence. Pre-Christian dogmas came with many using the springs as part of their rituals to a greater or lesser extent. The Druids, for instance, utilised springs for ritual nearly as often as their better-known sacred oak or hazel groves.

Then the Romans came to Britain in 55BC and pushed into Wales about 20 years later. They saw the organised and powerful druids as a threat and so the Roman leader Paulinus wiped them out along with their sacred rituals on their last stronghold of Anglesey before hastening to deal with Boudicca. Plas Goch (Red Place) and Bryn-y-Beddau (the Hill of Graves) probably owe their names to this ancient carnage as do the two fields near Llanidan still known as The Field of the Long Battle and the Field of Bitter Lamentation.

This Christian influx properly began round about the 4th century after the road network had been completed. Initially, some came with a retinue of craft and trade specialists together with a few warrior/labourers - a whole gaggle of (usually) twelve men besides the priest. The parallel with Jesus and his disciples is obvious.

Farm animals were also taken along and local tribes taught tradesman's crafts. To begin with, whenever a heathen sanctuary (like a well) was found it was damaged or even destroyed for being contrary to popular early Christian dogma. This unsociable practice often met with some stiff opposition and many of these early missionaries and their followers perished at the hands of outraged locals. However, more came to take their place in an unstoppable tide.

With an improving knowledge of indigenous pagan practices, the idea of using existing semi-religious sites and rites gained favour - a ploy which had been known to succeed in other countries the Roman legions had earlier conquered prior to Christianity. Rome issued an edict to this effect in the form of a list of suggestions on how to maximise conversion statistics using the native's own belief systems against themselves.

The way it worked was this:

1) The specially-trained missionary, often working alone, would choose a site where locals gathered and which appeared to hold significance to them. This would obviously have to be somewhere with enough nearby population from whom to scrounge food and with a reliable supply of fresh water for personal consumption close at hand. Sacred springs and stones fulfilled these requirements perfectly, especially as many monoliths and stone circles happened to be in close proximity to springs.

2) A hut or more permanent ‘cell’ would be constructed close to the spring and visitors engaged in a casual and general conversation which would then be skilfully steered to religious topics citing perceived similarities between early Catholicism and local beliefs, most of which would be centred on the spring or nearby stones.

3) Having gained the tacit (or more likely apathetic) tolerance of enough locals, more regular meetings would be arranged. Congregations grew in size and word spread to outlying districts. Gradually and insidiously the missionary would assert authority over the attributes of the spring, twisting ancient beliefs into those more in keeping with Christianity and thus beneficial to the Church. Christmas trees and Easter eggs as a result of this appropriation and poor old Cerennos – the Celtic