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Thanks for the message, Katy, and nice to hear that you're still involved. I haven't been near anywhere as glamorous as the Thermae, but I did have time off last weekend to visit St. Nectan's Well at Stoke. If you haven't been there, it's a treat. The bus stops at Hartland, and a footpath takes you down by the riverside, past the 12th-century Hartland Abbey to Stoke, which must be the sacred centre in the original regio of Hartland before the town was planned. St. Nectan's Church at Stoke has a Victorian window of the saint looking shaggy and eremitic, with another figure of him standing beside his severed head on the 30s reredos, and a copy of the modern icon in the Lady Chapel, nailed onto a cross which was made recently out of a venerable ash called Grandfather's Tree which used to grow over the lychgate. A little door takes you into the former sacristan's room, afterwards the Pope's Hole, which contains architectural fragments from a lost hilltop chapel of St. Catherine, the village stocks, two steel fox-traps, and other sacred objects. Plus a poem by Hawker of Morwenstow about a guilty self-flagellating monk. The well is listed, according to Terry Faull's book, but I couldn't see anything about it that would fix a date. The water is slightly astringent to the taste and gathers at the head of the slope leading down to the river valley below. Now here's something on which I'd appreciate any ideas from people who know the area. The Miracles of St. Nectan refer to quidam Brito - 'some Breton' or 'some guy called Britto', I'm not sure which - who sharpened his knife on the stone by the well marked with the blood of the martyr and came to a bad end. The Life, which is slightly later but still mid-C12, explains that after decapitation the saint placed his head on this stone, hence the bloody marks, which neither time nor rain could efface. I had imagined a natural outcrop of limestone or something like that with reddish veins in it. But the native stone, from which the wellhouse is built, is a dark ruddy-brown sandstone which weathers out in small blocks, and won't fit the story. So what was St. Nectan's stone? Then there's the miracle of the eel. One night, in living memory c.1150, the boys were sitting in the hubernum (which is evidently the Church House, and a mediaeval building is still there on the site as you come into Stoke) and brewing up in a cauldron, only it won't boil, and when they look inside they see that the sacred eel of St. Nectan is swimming in the water. So they take him out and return him to the well, and immediately the cold water starts seething furiously. We are to understand that before this incident someone had walked a few yards down the road with the cauldron, dipped it in the well, and scooped up the eel by mistake. But the cistern at the well today is much too small to contain the most modest eel and the water doesn't form a pool but runs straight down the slope. So is it possible that already in the 12th century, St. Nectan's Well was contained within a stone basin, large enough to contain an eel, of which at least part was built out of a non-native light-coloured stone with some dark streaks in it? A buff-coloured limestone is used in the church for the piers (late C14) and the font (Norman) so clearly something of this kind was available. The Life & Miracles of St. Nectan seem reliable enough in view of the local topography. There are still ash trees growing near the well where Aylward Butta cut down a most beautiful ash called the Magpie's Tree, and suffered for it - until he went to Clovelly (same route as the bus takes now) and dug up a replacement and planted it. All these damp valleys are full of ash trees, and the more unkempt bits are full of rushes and look very mediaeval. So does the overgrown bit of common at Torbery, which is presumably what all the uplands were like before intensive farming; I passed some cows who were chewing moodily at the thin grass there, and looking much as St. Nectan's cattle would have done when they wandered off towards Newton and were taken by robbers. The road from Newton must be the path that the saint took after he was decapitated, and for most of its course it keeps the keeps the church/hermitage in sight (not that this would have been a problem for him at the time) so perhaps it is an old church path. All the surrounding farms and hamlets buried at Stoke. I didn't see any sacred magpies, but two ravens flew overhead croaking loadly in an oracular manner. It was a good day out. Jeremy Harte ******************************************************************** The information contained in this message is confidential and may be legally privileged. The message is intended solely for the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, or reproduction is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by return e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. Visit the Epsom and Ewell Borough Council website at www.epsom-ewell.gov.uk This footnote also confirms that this e-mail message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com ********************************************************************