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WELLS-AND-SPAS  August 2006

WELLS-AND-SPAS August 2006

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Subject:

St. Nectan Of Hartland: One Man And His Eel

From:

Jeremy Harte <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

WATER TALK - the email discussion list for springs and spas enthusiasts <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 15:31:40 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

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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

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