Enjoying the vibes around Avebury: a Guest Well

An action-packed few days across the water included, of course, a visit or two to a holy well! Today’s well was arrived at at the end of a very special day enjoyed with my son and was a most magical experience.

Avebury Stone Circle

Based in Bristol, we decided to pop across the county border to Wiltshire and visit Avebury. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have been, you cannot fail to be other than utterly gobsmacked by the whole experience. Avebury is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest henge and stone circle in Europe and it is vast – it even has a very attractive village in the centre of it! Now owned and managed jointly by the National Trust and English Heritage, it is much visited but so spacious that there is the opportunity to feel plenty of awe and wonder.

The stones are colossal and the shapes strange, and the ditch of the henge is gigantic – just how did they do it? Why did they do it?

Silbury Hill

Pondering these questions and fuelled with excellent coffee and cheese scones, we decided to walk on to Silbury Hill, another monument in this huge ritual landscape. The bridle path was a delightful one, following the small meandering river, primroses flourishing and everywhere little black beetles mating.

If Avebury if gobsmacking, Silbury Hill is mesmerising and enigmatic. A huge pudding sitting majestic and unknown in the landscape, bobbing along on the horizon. It literally draws you in. At 30 metres high and covering an area of five acres, it is largest manmade prehistoric mound in Europe. Again you can’t help but wonder just how it was done (approximately 4 million hours of work were required an expert has calculated), and that’s before you even come on to the why.

No one really knows what it was built for although many people have attempted to offer answers: the resting place of the mythical King Sil, buried upright on his horse; the mother goddess awaiting impregnation in the Spring, a massive barrow or even a landing place for UFOs. It does have the distinction of being the first monument to be classified under the Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 yet fully retains its mystery.

We managed to get quite close and I was thrilled to see that the surrounding area was water-logged: a moat. It literally seemed to float in the field.

This phenomenon only happens in the early Spring and Michael Dames in his book The Silbury Treasure (1976) puts forward the very convincing theory that the mound represents the pregnant belly of the Goddess and the moat/ditch shapes can be interpreted as her squatting figure, ready to give birth.

West Kennet Long Barrow

We carried on, crossing the busy A4 and wend our way up towards West Kennet Long Barrow. This involved going through a ford and extreme mud and my posh(ish) non-walking boots have not recovered. This is another extraordinary monument perched up high on the crest of a hill, surrounded by pungent fields of emerging rapeseed. We hugged the stones and marvelled in the dark damp interior – continually in use for a 1000 years as a burial chamber, the resting place of 46 individuals, later deliberately sealed up.

What a view from up here and everywhere you look interesting things – barrows, tumps –  all forming an ancient and unknowable sacred landscape.

Swallowhead Spring

Pretty exhausted and vibed out by now we consulted Google to see how close we were to the sacred spring associated with these monuments. Close! My son led the way back down to the river Kennet then along a little wooded glen at the edge of the fields. What a treat – it was the rags I saw first and then the wicker arch that leads evocatively into the site.

The river was the most extraordinary limpid bluey green, partly due to the spirogyra streaming underneath the surface.

The large sarsens used as natural stepping stones were submerged just below the water. An old gnarly willow formed a natural arch over the water, liberally adorned with clooties and other offerings.

A flat slab made a perfect altar, a collection of offerings on its surface.

Wading through the damp grasses, clinging on to the willow tree and the head of the spring was revealed, the water today gently flowing. This is the Swallowhead, a short water course which joins the Winterbourne which in turn merges into the Kennet.

Dames refers to it as a cave-spring emerging from the rocky walls into a circular basin; hard to see today due to the overgrowth. He believes it is part of the sacred body that is the area around and containing Silbury Hill and suggests that it is the divine cranium.

The water has long been considered potent and connected with Silbury and the ritual landscape. Like the moat at Silbury, this water course is often dry magically, revived in the Spring. This short video shows what the area looks like when it is dry.

The great antiquarian William Stukeley visited in 1723 and his map shows the proximity of the spring to Silbury – you can just see it gushing into the river on the far left.

He observed:

… The country people have an anniversary meeting on the top of Silbury-hill on every Palm-Sunday, when they make merry with cakes, figs, sugar, and water fetch’d from the Swallow-head, or spring of the Kennet. This spring was much more remarkable than at present, gushing out of the earth, in a continued stream. They say it was spoil’d by digging for a fox who earth’d above, in some cranny thereabouts; this disturb’d the sacred nymphs, in a poetical way of speaking.

The water was considered to be efficacious for sore eyes and Stukeley noted that apium nodiflorum (fool’s watercress) grew on its banks, a plant often used as a remedy for tear duct infections. Apparently the temperature of the water remains a constant 10C throughout the year which allows the surrounding area to remain lush and verdant. Today there was a profusion of lungwort.

The water was also considered important during Palm Sunday celebrations when it was mixed with sugar. The mixing of sugar to holy well water seems quite common, especially concerning English wells, and sometimes licorice or treacle was used instead. Was it used to mask the taste of the often mineral heavy water or was there some other reason?

Offerings of moon-gazing hares, ribbons and other trinkets confirm that this sacred spring continues to be held in esteem today, the extraordinary mound of Silbury Hill watching over proceedings still. I reckon the sacred nymphs are alive and well.

A good account of the well can be found at HolyandHealingWells.

The location of the well can be found in the Gazetteer.