Greetings Christine,
And don't forget ritual bathing too. "Barking up the wrong megalith" I like that :))
Bearing in mind that springs pop up all over the place and if fresh or good water is hard to come by in a particular region it might take on more than usual importance and be considered holy in antiquity. Similarly with saline springs - many of which are brackish, suffer from drought, or seepage of freshwater - but even these have been exploited
when salt is hard to come by, or because they contain a variety of minerals used therapeutically for bathing . German salt sources are relatively low in sodium chloride and extraordinary methods were used to capture (or rather remove the impurities) to recover salt using blackthorn gradation (essentially hedges) over which the saline water is dripped to precipitate the calcium salts on the hedge, thereby removing them.
For all these reasons the Droitwich springs exploited for salt were and are exceptional worldwide: the brine comes to the surface without deep digging, is virtually free of mineral impurities, and the brine, that is fully saturated yields much salt, which was of course profitable, and accounts for it's being exploited for salt continuously from the late
Bronze Age to to the 20th century. Often erroneously compared historically to the Dead Sea, it is never made clear that they are comparable only in the density of the saline water - however, the Dead Sea contains a variety of bitter
minerals like boron, potassium, magnesium etc. I have looked long and hard worldwide for a natural site that is
comparable to Droitwich , and so far have not found it, though one would think there must be others. I have also
talked with geochemists as to the conditions that are responsible for the purity of the Droitwich brine, and none came up with a logical answer. It is just unusual for soil, that water passes through to reach the surface, not to contain a
variety of soluble minerals. Maybe someone will surprise me one day by discovering a comparable site :)
Best wishes,
Bea
Beatrice Hopkinson
Hon. Secretary Oxford University Soc. LA Branch
President, DBSAT (Droitwich Brine Springs and ArchaeologicalTrust)
Board AIA (Archaeological Institute of America)
Affiliate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA
On Apr 18, 2013, at 12:56 AM, stephen buckley wrote:
Hi, Bea - seems to me that holy wells were 'special' in different ways, depending on their properties, and you have to take each on its own terms. Waters at Bath, Droitwich, Buxton and Malvern offer different benefits, but are all significant (and have been important commercially to their local economies). The water of some springs has always been valued for its purity, and that's significant in itself when the alternative in Europe was to drink fermented and alcoholic liquids to avoid bugs. Spas have traditionally been thermal; chalybeate springs were fashionable when anaemia was a frequent diagnosis, other springs provide minerals that aid digestion. Some outdoor springs you bathed in (which was continued in a non-religious context following a medical fad in 18th C), others were 'eye-wells'. Pilgrimage sites of all kinds have been economic resources, of course. 
