Stratton on the Fosse, Somerset

Edington, Wiltshire

St Alphege's Well, North-East Somerset

In my pursuit of mosses and liverworts from springs, I decided that our next stop would be St Alphege's well, just under the crest of Lansdown. It was pouring with rain by now, that really wet sort that makes your hair stick to your face. I should have known better as I dragged poor B down the road in her Mediterranean puffer jacket and fashionable boots. But I had a vague recollection of coming here a long time ago and it being easy to find. Oh poor memory. We were soon faced with a gate saying 'private', a sight I always associate with angry shotgun-wielding farmers. I'm sure the people who live here are very nice but the pouring rain put me off walking up the very long drive to find out. In addition, as soon as I crossed the boundary, seven pairs of extremely curious eyes were immediately fastened on me - seven alpacas craning their long necks at the ridiculous sight of a soaked human being. I gave up pathetically, though I did find the little ditch where the water from the well runs down the hill.

I found the photo above in the aforementioned Proceedings and I do remember the little door from my visit over ten years ago. But further pursuit of this site must wait. If the trough in front still exists, I'm hoping it'll be home to some mosses.

In my defence of its inclusion, St Alphege was of the same era as the focus of this blog. He was supposed to have been born in Weston (below the hill of the well) and met an unpleasant end in 1012. But then you don't get to be a saint by avoiding unpleasant ends. The Proceedings say "A quarter of a mile from the well ... is Chapel Farm. This was originally St. Laurence's Hospice for pilgrims on the road to Glastonbury. It is not uncommon to find a Holy Well by a frequented pilgrim track, and this is a good example."  And I see St A. spent time at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, which is home to a super-swirly font which I'm keen to see one day.

Charlcombe, North-East Somerset

Charlcombe font was such a treat. I've not really captured the niceness of its shape very well, which you can see better in this photograph from a hundred years ago. It's very goblet-y, and the decoration nestles irregularly around the base of the bowl in a very pleasing way.

In my defence it was immensely dark in this lovely little church. We have discovered one of the difficulties with wintery drawing tours - there isn't enough light. The churches today did have lights, but they seemed to be keeping some of them to themselves, the switches were nowhere in sight. I suppose they don't want random visitors switching on all the lights and then pissing off. At our first stop here in Charlcombe there were a couple on a timer which periodically plunged us into darkness. And I mean darkness, if we hadn't had the door open we'd have been scrabbling about in a ridiculous fashion.

I'm not really complaining though as this place was superb. B was extremely taken with the way the font bowl and base had been carved from the same lump of stone, so the pleasing overall shape was how it was always intended (we don't see that as often as you'd think).

The carved decoration ran all the way round the bowl, but it was particularly embellished facing the doorway. The petal-like design featured in some places what I can only interpret as mushrooms. That might not be what was in the mind of the carver but that's what they look like to me.

The location of this church is superb as well. I'd remembered it being closer to the road but it's actually raised up on the side of the valley, and below it is something very peaceful and special, a spring. The field below the church, in which it arises, has been kept as a garden, and as well as all the delicious mossiness and liverwortiness of the spring, there was a superb twisted ancient tree simply covered in lichens. I was delighted to see a tiny sprig of Usnea which surely only likes properly fresh air - amazing considering the proximity to Bath and its interminable traffic jams.

There seems no point in including my photo of the holy well - although our eyes were adjusted to the gloom, the camera was having none of it and I didn't have a tripod to hold it still. The result is virtual blackness.

Here's an extract about it from the Proceedings of the Bath and District Branch of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society for 1909-1913.
"Mr. Grey ... tells me he has known of this one, under the name of St. Mary's Well, for a great number of years. It is close to the old Norman Church at Charlcombe, in the Rectory garden, amid a clump of ferns. The inhabitants have a tradition that the water is good for the eyes, and some twenty years ago persons were known to come and take it away in bottles. It is also stated to be a "wishing well," and I believe the water is still taken from this source for baptisms. Mr. Grey gives an extract from a letter in which the writer states that a lady derived considerable benefit from this well, through applying the water to her eyes."

I suppose it's natural that our interest in fonts should be given an extra boost when there's a holy well in the vicinity that would have been used to fill that font. That's a pretty cool thought.


And as an erstwhile student of literature, I'm sure it gave B an extra smile to think that Henry Fielding was married here, and Jane Austen visited here.

The south doorway had some extreme trumpetyness going on, but I wasn't sure how truly old it was (it was very neat), and the north doorway is also alleged to be Norman. However, we couldn't see that one because a little room had been tacked onto the church to the north.

John Collinson wrote in his History of Somerset that "the common tradition is that it was the mother church to Bath, and that the abbey used to pay it annually a pound of pepper by way of acknowledgment." That may or may not be true but it's a fun thought. It's certainly a very ancient church (and has a more ancient look than the rebuilt Abbey).

Doulting, Somerset

There's not much at the church in Doulting that speaks of great age, other than the two capitals on the north door. And they were very nice albeit simple. Unmatching, of course (and just how I like it). The left one now reminds me of something I saw Mary Berry and her sidekick make on the tv the other day (a passionfruit and lime charlotte russe). The right hand side design has an organic foliate feel. Perhaps it echoes something of the amazing liverworts we were to see imminently.

Because coming out of the hillside below the church is St Aldhelm's Well, a holy spring. It's only a short walk, along a be-treed path and between stone walls down a steep lane.

CC image by Kerryn

I wanted to visit it especially to check out the mosses and liverworts there. Which were lush and rife, and much squealing was heard. The water was so clear and cold, and the noise of it splashing down out of the big stone trough was so continuous and soothing. It was just a superb spot. I felt invigorated by being there.

People were filling big water containers and carting them away in their cars, presumably to Benefit from its springyness and sanctity. So I figured the water couldn't be that full of nasties. B and I both took a mouthful. It certainly had its own taste, but it was hard to say of what.

Bratton, Wiltshire

Photo by Rog Frost

Bratton church was in a strange sort of place. If you want to get to it you can either follow a long road from the other end of the village, or take a path which involves going down and then up these amazing steps. I was very taken with the steps. I don't understand why there aren't lots of photos of them on the internet. They have an ancient mossy air. I hope B took a photo I can borrow, because they don't look like anything much on that link. But in reality they were really something special.

I have to research and write a dissertation over the next year, and I've kind of decided it should be on the mosses that grow at springs in Wiltshire. It's a bit of a vague concept at present. And today was my first practical step into the idea. So where the steps at Bratton church stop going down and start going up again, there's a little stream, and donning some wellingtons I paddled my way towards its source. The site is called 'Church Springs' unsurprisingly. I collected some mosses but it made me realise my little idea isn't going to be as straightforward as I'd hoped.

But moving on from the bryology, what better spot could one have for church sculpture visit? Sadly, the church wasn't exactly replete with Romanesque interest. Someone had written that the carved heads on the outside of the porch were Saxon. Yeah right I Doubt It (scroll down), and I don't think we've ever seen such a Saxon thing as a carved head, it's usually knotwork. Wishful thinking eh. This might be tied up with the wishful thought that the church is there because of the springs, a continuation of pagan respect for them. But probably it's there rather because the village was there, and that was there because of the springs. Because you have to have water don't you. Respect can come from that of course, and the Church Springs are said to be unfailing (that's the kind of spring you want).

The font inside was evidently Norman style, but it was so neat and even that it didn't look old, and Pevsner called it 'recut'. It's a nice design (there's a picture here) but it didn't have that wonky vibe that the Romanesque Carving Fan craves.

Alton Priors, Wiltshire

Having probably ensured a lifetime free of vampires by eating the garliciest garlic bread ever at the Barge Inn, we drove to the churches close by at Alton Barnes and Alton Priors. I'm getting so picky that I wasn't that impressed by Alton Barnes. It was ludicrously cute really, as you can see by this Geograph photo by Kevin Farmer. But its alleged Saxon origins weren't that obvious to me. The two churches are very close, but there were quadrupeds (as Mr Pevsner would say) in the fields between and were feeling cowardly and drove round (it would have been much nicer to walk over the fields though).

Alton Priors is completely different. It's more isolated, like an island in the middle of a field. You have to climb over a stile to get into its enclosure. There's the most enormous yew tree (or rather, two enormous yew trees) to the south side of the building. I did my usual hopeful 'close your eyes and walk through the portal' thing, walking through the gap between the trunks, but remained in the 21st century. Ah well.

The church is much larger than Alton Barnes, and its emptiness seemed to give it a more interesting atmosphere. It's looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust. There are some interestingly carved Jacobean pews in the chancel. But I liked the ancient 'imposts' of the chancel arch with their dotted blob motif - definitely Norman (and an early kind of design? - it's so simple, it's reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon things we've seen?).

I knew there were supposed to be large sarsen stones under the church floor. The 'trap doors' didn't have their handles though. I wonder if the CCT is fed up of people looking? I wonder why were the trap doors ever built? I suppose someone thought the stones were curious enough to be worth looking at (the floor and doors are quite new looking).

What with the stones and the massive yews it's no wonder people speculate this place is a bit special, with its hint of holiness beyond Christianity. And now I come to read more on the internet - it seems I've missed out seeing another excellent thing at the site. There are two spring-fed pools with bubbles coming up - the source of the Avon. We'll have to return. Bob Trubshaw talks about it on the 'In Search of Holy Wells and Healing Springs' blog.

Coulston, Wiltshire

We couldn't get into the church at Coulston, which was a shame, and there was no information about where to get a key. But perhaps it didn't matter because most of Mr P's promised interestingness was outside.

In the south side of the building is a Norman doorway with a lovely golden round arch. On each side is a capital with little volutes (a bit eroded). But curiously, although there are these capitals, there aren't any columns underneath them. And it doesn't even look as though there were any - that is, there's no mark on the stone to suggest they've been whipped away. But I suppose there must have been once.

The poor arch looks rather neglected since someone's seen fit to pile up a load of plastic chairs underneath it. It looked strangely surreal, so I didn't feel as outraged as I might. But to most people it would surely look a bit rubbish. I don't really understand, because I don't find anything very interesting about all these brash Victorian rebuildings of churches. And so if you've got something left of the interesting past, of the beginnings of your church, why wouldn't you look after it? Maybe the congregation would say that there's more to their church than the building, in fact that the building's probably the least important bit. I dunno. It was a bit disappointing to see, anyway.

But another truly interesting thing outside was the spring coming out of the hillside facing the archway. As we stepped gingerly across the marshy ground towards it, we were watched closely by many eyes. The spring is inside a deer park and a couple of stags and many female deer lined up on the ridge above us. We seemed very interesting to them for some reason.

The water runs into a pool where there was a lot of watercress. Then we could hear it heading under the path past the church. The area had a special and rather strange air. It was hard not to think of elfish pagan things and whether or not the site for the church had been chosen in relation to this water.

(An interesting though morbid little snippet, is that the murdered child in the Victorian 'Rode House' case (recently retold in 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher'), is buried in this churchyard. The family previously lived at Baynton House nearby, and the father's first wife is also buried here).

Images copyright Rhiannon 2014.