(The Vale of Ewyas looking west)
You might say I stumbled my way into the Christian East almost twenty years ago: landing first in the Balkans and Asia Minor, followed later by the Caucasus and finally, the Levant. I have returned again and again to all but the latter. As is so often the case in life, our most cherished gifts are things we never knew we were searching for. I went East guided by nothing more than curiosity and a constrained wallet. What I experienced there, in fact, set my life upon a different course.
Foremost among my discoveries was the realization that a particular place can have sanctity, or holiness. This concept was completely foreign to me, just so much theological verbiage, I suppose, that had no real practical application in my former fundamentalist sect. This exposure to holy places, nurtured by the blood of martyrs, and the prayers and pilgrimages of the faithful, came first. The rest of the Faith would follow later.
The U.S., of course, has no holy places. In truth, we never stood much chance to have any. The colonists who settled North America were the adherents of an already denatured belief system. So of all the ideologies that took root in our soil-whether Calvinism, Arminianism, Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Restorationism, or any other of the myriad isms of Protestantism-none made any provision for the sanctity of place, nor the accompanying veneration of the saints. Accordingly, there sometimes seems to be a certain hollowness at our core. We are not a land of pilgrimage. Would that we were. For a belief in the sanctity of place infers that the otherworldly–the world more real than our own-is separated from us by only a “thin veil,” as Arthur Machen would say. And, often more to his point, this separation also applies to the demonic as well.
I started returning to the U.K. in 2016, followed by four subsequent journeys in 2017, 2018, 2019, and this summer. On every itinerary, I sought out hidden or mostly-forgotten places: including the few remaining relics of the saints, the old Celtic and Saxon crosses, and churches from before the Conquest. More often than not, however, it was the holy wells I was seeking.
I would be naive to say that the old faith was a pure seamless garment from the Caucasus to Ireland. And yet, on the important things, it once was. The Harrowing of Hell I saw depicted on an early 12th-century Norman font in Radnorshire is the same scene I viewed six weeks earlier in a tiny Orthodox church of the same period, in the foothills of the Caucasus, in remotest Svaneti. I have always looked for the connectivity between peoples and cultures. So in my view, the garment was not yet torn, although the dye could certainly differ around the edges. And to be sure, the British Isles were far from the center of things, actually on the very fringes of Christendom. Author and Machen scholar Mark Valentine poetically dubs it as “an island of ghosts at the end of the word…a twilight province.”1
(Seen through the lychgate—Church of St. Issui at Padrishow)
The idiosyncratic faith of Britain, rooted as it was in myth and mystery, took on a unique local nature all its own. While the veneration of the saints was universal practiced before the upheavals unleashed by the Reformation, perhaps nowhere was the cult of the saints more pronounced than in the British Isles. Before the well of saints ran dry, Britain produced many hundreds of them (the numbers vary, but all lists run to the innumerable). The rhythm of daily life revolved around a liturgical year chockablock with feasts, festivals and pilgrimages. The countless holy wells were an integral part of the veneration. Of course, no one seriously questions the pagan origins of these sites, steeped in significance long before the advance of Christianity, the wells being subsequently baptized, as it were, into the new faith.
(From the well, looking up towards the church)
The Normans discouraged much of this sort of thing; supplanting local saints with continental ones in an effort to bring English Christianity more in line with the Gallic practice. They were successful, I suppose, at least superficially (St. George replaced St. Edmund, etc.), but on a deeper level the locals won out: the Saxons, Cornish, Welsh and Scots continued to venerate their local saints as before, and devotion to the holy wells went on unabated. Rome was, in fact, a long ways away.
The English Reformation was a tragedy on so many levels: religious, social, economic, and cultural. This shock, followed by generations of suppression, and finally the mopping-up of the Cromwellian Rebellion one hundred years later, left the old faith in tatters. Eamon Duffy characterized it as “a great cultural hiatus, which had dug a ditch, deep and dividing, between the English people and their past.”2 Slowly, inexorably, the edifice sluffed away once the foundations had been jettisoned. Today empty whitewashed husks dot the countryside, bearing silent witness to the loss. In the U.K. one has a sense of there being so many churches; in fact, too many churches. But once, with only a fraction of today’s population, these sanctuaries were full. And yet the holy wells remained, and more importantly, they were remembered, at least by some.
(Remains of the old cross)
Once outside of British cities, one does not have to go far to find a holy well . They exist in all sorts of conditions. Some have elaborate well houses, such as St. Clether’s Well in Cornwall (due in large part to the efforts of the indefatigable Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould), while others are completely natural, without any manmade accoutrements, such as St. Cybi’s Well in Ceredigion. Some are very accessible, even too accessible as in the case of St. Oswald’s Well in Shropshire. St. Morwenna’s Well in Devon is, by contrast, practically inaccessible. On my third attempt, I caught a glimpse of the top of the wellhouse, while clinging precariously to the side of the coastal bluff. Of all the wells I have visited, St. Issui’s near the Powys and Monmouthshire border is my favorite.
(Sheep in the meadow alongside St. Issui’s)
In 2017, I visited the Orthodox parish in Lampeter, a small college town in Carmarthenshire. They were using the fellowship hall of a Methodist chapel that no longer needed that space. I enjoyed the liturgy, as well as the coffee hour following. The priest told me of local sites they visited on pilgrimage: St. Cybi’s well, Abbe Dore, and the church and well at St. Issui’s. Of the three, I had already visited the latter. He told me that St. Issui’s was a way station on the medieval pilgrimage trail which snaked westerly to St. David’s (Dewi Sant) on the southwestern tip of Wales.
(The rood screen at St. Issui’s)
The church is perched high on a hill, on the western ridges of the Vale of Ewyas. Down in the valley lies the River Honddu, Llanthony Abbey, Cwmyoy, Capel-y-ffin, and the New Monastery, all richly atmospheric, with their varied literary associations. But the narrow track to St. Issui goes only there; in fact ending just past the church. I am reminded of an old Georgian saying: “What is the purpose of a road if it does not lead to a church?” I usually go to the church first, then walk back down to the holy well.
St. Issui was an early hermit and holy man, supposedly murdered by a traveller to whom he had offered hospitality. Later a rich man was healed of his leprosy by the waters of the nearby spring. In gratitude, he gave the gold to build the church over the grave of St. Issui in the mid 11th-century. This is one of the few remaining examples of an Eglwys y bedd (Church of the grave). And as the entire church sat over his grave, his relics were spared the iconoclastic frenzy which later denuded Britain of her saintly relics.
The present church was built in the 12th-century, then rebuilt in the 15th and 16th centuries. A dated 11th century font remains, as well as an exquisite early 16th century rood screen that somehow survived Reformational desecratons. Perhaps it was too far up in the hills to tote the sledgehammers. The most intriguing aspect of the church is perhaps the Doom Icon, now revealed from underneath the whitewashed west wall.
Americans tend to view Britain as having always been at the center of things, in the same way we now view ourselves, rightly or wrongly. But as was implied earlier, it was, until the days of empire, perched on the periphery of things–and that included Christendom. For some reason, the British do not use the term iconography to describe what they simply refer to as wall paintings. And true enough, they are far from the stylized iconography of the East. They are, nevertheless, a form of that very thing. Even the best of the lot, such as, for example, the Martyrdom of St. Edmund in Pickering, are cruder and less sophisticated than Eastern iconography. But what they lack in subtlety and nuance, they make up in getting the point across. At St. Issui’s, instead of an elaborate Last Judgment covering the West wall, there is simply a skeletal figure holding an hourglass, a scythe, and a shovel. The implications were no doubt not lost on any parishioner as they exited the church.
(The Doom Painting)
The well is located down the hill from the church. A compact stone wellhouse encloses a small spring that bubbles up out of the side of the hill, before it tumbles down to the Honddu far below. The site is well-visited. I have never been there that I did not meet someone going or coming. The site retains a mystical reputation, you might say. Pilgrims leave coins and all sorts of trinkets on a ledge, or wedged in the stone crevices. Perhaps they do not even know why they are coming, but the mystique lingers, so they continue in pilgrimage. And there have been some reports of healing from its waters. The old faith–mere superstitions to the modern–linger on in ways no longer understood.
I have a coin, so I leave it on the ledge. Then I squat at the lip of the well and lean forward enough for my right hand to dip into the clear water. I am not praying for healing of any sort, nor am I expecting a mystical experience. I am simply squatting in the same way as pilgrims have done here since time immemorial. That puts me in the narrative of a very old story, if not the oldest. I ask for St. Issui’s intercession and I bring my hand out, slowly crossing myself on my forehead, right to left in the way I have been taught. The cool spring water refreshes me. That is enough.
(My son James at the well, 2019)
Mark Valentine, “Except Seven,” The Fig Garden and Other Stories (Carleton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus Press, 2022), 31.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), xiv.
Wonderful. I see reflected my own sorrow--heightened after having lived for two years in Kakheti--of being in a land that almost entirely lacks landmarks of antiquity, let alone sanctity. Relatedly, I remember some time back a conversation with my priest about patron saints, and how arbitrary it feels for Americans (me, anyway) to identify with any one in particular, because the saints of our faith have basically no local embodiment in ritual/festal memory or site of pilgrimage.