Well, well, well...

St Cybi's Well

Am I getting old? I feel like I’m getting old. My bones ache a little more each day - the most recent casualty of the aching - my left knee. Ouch it hurts. This along with my shoulder and back leads me to believe that I either have rheumatism or arthritis. I’d go to the doctor again but he’ll just stick me on some more pills and tell me to lose weight (he’s right about that one of course). Yes, I’m getting old and starting to wear out.

We needed to go a calling yesterday, over to our quite new friends at their lovely sixteenth century house at Llangybi. The house is fantastic. It used to be an inn and has massive slates for floors, some of which are recycled gravestones. It’s all oak beams and cream stone walls – enough of that though it makes me jealous.

Llangbi is a lovely little village, lots of history, and Jayne offered to show us St Cybi’s Well. I knew there was a well in Llangybi but hadn’t ever got around to getting myself welled-up enough to bother to go seeking it out – after all one well is pretty much like another isn’t it - hole in the ground surrounded by a low wall with a bucket on a rope – right?

Wrong.

Crossing the part-cobble road from the house we walked to and through the slate tombstone littered Churchyard, then over a gated stone stile into a sunlit meadow, down some worn stone steps built into an ancient wall that surrounded fresh, green, lush pasture… and into another world.

St Cybi’s Well sits in a beautiful hidden valley, under tall Oak and Ash trees, beneath a small mountain of a hill crowned with an Iron age hill fort. As we walked towards the well buildings I half expected to see a white unicorn come galloping across the field or catch a glimpse of a butterfly winged fairy out of the corner of my eye. Sounds corny, but it really is a magical place, one of those quiet places where enchantment is everyday and ‘stuff’ has been going on for tens of centuries in the background, almost unnoticed, hidden – a kind of ambient mystical buzzing.







Inside the well house

The well is in ruins but still recognisable as a dwelling. There are two well chambers, a cottage for the well-keeper and a small attached bath building. We approached the well across a stone causeway on one side of a flower strewn water meadow. Meadow flowers of pink, yellow and white peeped through the coarse water grass - after a few days of rain the ground would be boggy, but following two weeks of sunshine and almost no rain, it just squelched a little.

The main well chamber is built of large stone blocks with a deep open doorway. St Cybi’s Well is a place of pilgrimage - the place to come to cure warts, lameness, blindness, scrofula, scurvy and rheumatism.

Rheumatism? Maybe I could… no don’t be silly.

St Cybi settled here in the middle of the sixth century from Cornwall after travelling in Europe and Ireland. When he landed on the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Mon), legend has it that he struck a rock with his staff from which water immediately flowed. I don’t know how that connects to this well, but magic water is magic water wherever you find it so let’s not get too hung up on the detail.

To become well (pun, sorry) and cured you had drink an equal quantity of well-water and sea water, morning and evening, for around a week or so, bathe in the water once or twice a day, and spend the nights in the attached cottage. If you became warm in bed then you were getting better and if you were cold… well let’s just say it was time to throw some more silver in the well, pray harder, and consider a fitting epitaph for that slate tombstone that will soon have your name on it at the church across the way.

Inside the well building, sunlight from the open roof sends light and shadows tumbling around the walls and water. It’s cool inside - not cold, dim - but not gloomy, damp - but not dank. It’s a comfortable place, not physically, but spiritually. Calm, serene… and very pagan. There are good forces here, forces that have been here since long before St Cybi’s arrival, and maybe some forces that are not quite so good - Nyads and Sprites, Dryads and Hamadryads. I can feel them, but not see or hear them, they echo and shadow around me.

I kneel and reach down into the clear, cool water, scooping out a handful, water bugs and all. The crystal clear water falls nimbly from between my leaking fingers and back into the pool where it belongs. I rub some onto my knee. It’s cold and refreshing, making my knee tingle and warming it.

Did something flash in the water? A face, a hand reaching out to me, a healing hand? No, it couldn’t have been – just a shadow, a trick of the light, imagination - it'll get me hanged one day.

Afterwards, making our way back across the meadow and through the churchyard, I wish I’d left something as payment – a coin or two, some bread, a little wine maybe.

Next time.

Has it helped? Actually I think it has a little. When I got up this morning my knee felt better than it had in ages and I was pretty warm in bed last night.

Still got the scurvy, warts, and scrofula though.

Oh well.

The healing well water