Sing Levy Dew

Fifty Holy Wells, #32, 33, 34

The Three Wells of Gumfreston, Pembrokeshire, Wales

I’ve been around a bit on this tour of the waters, but I’ve not seen anything quite like this. We’re still in Wales this week, less than twenty miles from the cathedral ‘city’ of St David’s that we visited last time. This feels like a different world, though. Actually it feels like a different time. We could have stepped into the middle ages here; or perhaps into Middle Earth. Which obviously would suit me very well indeed.

Gumfreston is a tiny settlement in south Pembrokeshire which is probably not famous for anything. You could pass by and easily miss the medieval church of St Lawrence. To find it, you need to turn down a green lane into a beautiful, silent hollow of trees and ferns. It’s at this point you begin to feel like you’re exiting the modern world. When you get to the bottom of the lane, there in the damp, silent hollow, you find this:

What a church. It looks like it has grown from the ground. It was in fact built in the twelfth century, and it seems it hasn’t changed much since. The interior contains ancient floor tiles, medieval wall paintings and, apparently, the oldest church bell in the county. So I’m told, anyway: I couldn’t get inside because, alas, this church is no longer in use. Last summer, when we visited, it was locked up, and there was a ‘for sale’ sign on the ancient front door. Naturally I immediately fantasised about buying the place. I’m not sure what I would do with a Tolkeinesque medieval church in south Wales, nor where I would find the vast sum needed to keep it standing up, but if I’d had it, I probably would have spent it on the spot.

There is something about the spiritual and architectural beauty of a medieval church in Britain that is unsurpassed. I’ve visited hundreds in my lifetime, and they never cease to grab hold of me. The best of them are so steeped in their place that they look like they have been there forever:

The sacred geometry of an ancient church is a perfect melding of the human, the natural and the divine:

Perhaps they feel so rooted in place because they are often built on sites that were sacred before the church was raised. Gumfreston church was built on the site of a llan - an old Welsh world which these days is a prefix, it seems, for almost every town in the country. A llan originally, though, was a small walled settlement inhabited by the country’s earliest Christians. There was a llan here before the church, apparently. And there were the wells:

There are three wells here - you can see them in the photo above - and, uniquely, they all have separate sources. None seems to have been dedicated to any saint, but they have been visited for many centuries. I visited myself on a sunny day last summer with my family, my mum and her partner Tim. Tim is a true Renaissance man, with musician, poet, marine pollution expert and amateur folklorist among the strings to his bow, and he filled me in on the folklore of Gumfreston, and told me a few tales of people he’d bumped into at the wells over the years. Once, he said, he had met an old man who came to the wells annually and took away a demijohn full of water to add to his evening whisky. This was apparently a tradition handed down from his own grandfather.

Not only does each of these wells have a different source, but each contains, so it is said, anyway, a different kind of water. One of them is chalybeate - a word I’d never heard before - one is sulphurous and one is spring water. Whatever the exact difference in composition, it is said that each offers a different cure. The chalybeate water treats problems with hands and arms, the sulphurous water helps with the eyes, and the spring water sorts out leg problems.

The tradition around these parts - as it was also, apparently, at St Non’s well - is to throw pins or nails into the waters as an offering. I didn’t see any when I looked. There wasn’t much sign of anything but leaves in the silent waters, in fact:

The site as a whole is equally silent, and seems unvisited. I’d say that people come here quietly though, as we did, and maybe depart in stillness too. It’s that kind of place. Some of them even leave little signs of their passing, if you know where to look. Walk around the back of the church, for instance, and you will find a secret message hidden among the stones and the creeping buttercup:

According to Tim, the use of ‘New Year’s Water’ is an old custom in south Pembrokeshire. Children would come to the wells of Gumfreston, among other places, and draw water into cups, which they would sprinkle on houses and people to bring good luck for the coming year. In The Holy Wells of Wales, by Francis Jones, published in the 1950s, we find a song they would sing as they did so:

Here we bring water from the well so clear,
For to worship God with this happy new year;
Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine,
With seven bright gold wires, the bugles that do shine;
Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her toe,
Open you the west door, and turn the old year go:
Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her chin,
Open you the east door, and let the new year in.

I suppose this tradition is gone now, like most old rural ways. The church is gone too: its doors closed and locked. This could make a mournful ending to this week’s pilgrimage, except that things have changed since my visit. Towards the end of last year, the church was bought by the charity Friends of Friendless Churches, who have now raised enough money to begin shoring it up and preventing its ruin. Restoration works, it seems, have begun.

This has to be good news. I only hope they don’t fix it up too much. As a Christian, I should probably prefer busy, bustling churches to silent ivied ruins, but frankly I have mixed feelings on the matter. Give me a hidden, green hollow over a sensible, ‘accessible’ prayer hub any day. Still, I expect this is my problem. Maybe I should take a sip of well water and try to cure it.