Rites of the Spring
Well-dressing and the Cult of Arnemetia
Well-dressing is much loved local custom which enjoys an almost exclusive patronage in the county of Derbyshire. It’s origins are much debated and appear to be forever showed in the deep history of the regions ancient past, yet when stripping away the layers of the tradition involved in the ceremony and pairing with the regions Roman past, a very curious picture begins to emerge.
Local Mutations
Local tradition can be a curious thing. Much like folklore, original meaning is often mis- transcribed and direct origins impossible to uncover. As a result, its modern rites and rituals come to create an entirely separate ceremony from that which went before; no less loved by local observers, but ultimately, lovingly misunderstood. In some ways, this can be seen as a telescopic view of our broader British customs and celebrations. It's hard to find a Christian festival that isn't a superimposition of a far earlier, seasonal pagan event. That isn't a statement designed to offend, rather simply a truth of history.
Easter, with its story of resurrection and rebirth, is a great example of this, with virtually every indigenous European culture that came to find themselves beneath the yoke of the Roman Empire, and therefore Roman Catholicism, sharing similar springtime festivals which celebrate the rebirth of the year following the darkness and death of winter. The timing of Christmas too is in this vein, with an ancient festival of light and fire, inspired by the winter solstice, being a common trait amongst those subservient early Romano-European communities.
On a local level though, these traditions are less about the adoption of existing festival days and much more about the adaptation of distant beliefs and superstitions. Some of these events, actually most I dare say, have cause to make us smile. Cheese rolling competitions, born from half-remembered ancient stories of the devil cursing the cows of the village. Saucy, sometimes obscene, local plays, performed annually in forgotten acknowledgment of Viking fertility raids. Strange, wonderful, obfuscated tales all, paired with homemade Lemonade, charity fetes and tombola prizes. And just like folklore, these traditions are safely passed forward to future generations by the very virtue of their mutations; a process in which the tradition is observed far more because “it's a tradition” and far less because of the fears and beliefs that first inspired it into existence.
Yet at the heart of these traditions, which we may on occasion glimpse by considering the wider context of their regional history, we can at times find a prism through which we might view our own local heritage in a very different light to that in which we otherwise would do today. This is a piece about one such tradition. A tradition which exists almost entirely within the borders of Derbyshire's Peak District; and to which thousands of people pledge their time and energy every year.
A Derbyshire Tradition
As winter turns to spring, there are a host of rituals we will find littered throughout our daily lives, often without thinking of them as such. Easter will bring its bunnies and eggs. May Day, it's fairs and community gatherings.
Across the Peak District, the annual well-dressing celebrations will no doubt have been on the minds of church committees and community groups since the turn of the year. Across the Peak District, in more than 100 locations in towns, villages, and hamlets alike, locals will gather together in a ceremony designed to assure protection of their local water supply. Many of these events have come to be tightly bound to local churches and so the event today has very much the feel of a Church celebration and although there is a variance in the exact date of the ceremony, broadly being spread between May and September, the core rituals and principles are essentially the same. Taking around a week to prepare, wet clay is spread across a large wooden board, sometimes up to 6 feet high, before flower petals and other totems of nature are built up into an elaborate design, the clay being kept damp throughout the process to avoid cracking. It is a process that takes hundreds of hours to complete before the structure is placed at the community well and blessed by a local church official. Then, it's time for a week's worth of celebrations, with a carnival taking place to close, part of which may well involve the "crowning" of a local child as the official Well Queen.
A popular assertion in recent years has founded a common belief that the whole idea of well-dressing is intrinsically bound to a time of plague with the village of Tissington believed to have dressed its well following the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Other sources point to the events surrounding the village of Eyam and the plague of 1665. But really, these are little more than natural assumptions, as there is little official record. That isn't however, to say we cant dig a little deeper in search of an origin. In the case of well-dressing, that origin may prove to be quite unexpected.
Well of Time
The first recorded mention regarding the practice of well-dressing comes from 1758 with a record of the laying of garlands at the well in Tissington, but local lore across the peaks had by that time established the practice having been in place for as long as common memory could recall. To my mind, its specific association with Eyam is a stretch. The residents of Eyam, a village in the Derbyshire Dales, having become infected with plague following a bundle of cloth being received from London by local tailor Alexander Hadfield, took the decision to isolate themselves from the surrounding world in an attempt to stop a further spread into the north of England. Around 250 of 700 local inhabitants lost their lives in the process; a true sacrifice for the ages.
That such a service of blessing would grow in the surrounding villages as a result, is certainly plausible, but curiously, in a place so well acquainted with its plague history, where individual graves are remembered to this very day, that there is no story associated with the village wells and their part in the villages’ survival means that direct correlation struggles for currency. After all, as we can all appreciate, water is somewhat naturally abundant across the peaks, falling from the sky on what can sometimes feel like a daily basis. For me, water, even in times of plague, just isn't the kind of regionally rarefied commodity that would inspire or require - even in the late medieval mindset of the Black Death back in the 1340s - this kind of deep traditional gestation, given its regional abundance. Yet the fact remains, the tradition of well-dressing in the peaks is a unique curio of such entrenchment that it is as a remarkable thing to behold as are its origins to consider.
To get a useful view on the subject then, let us strip back the layers on the topic of well- dressing for a moment and see just what that process reveals beneath.
The presentation of the Well Queen, much like the more widespread May Queen, has real pagan potential. The implication, far less palatable than we might wish to acknowledge - a child being brought forth, especially dressed and presented to a specific site to in some way encourage good fortune of the community - is a Christianised memory of the act of ritual sacrifice. But, in the case of the Well Queen, this is far more likely to be attributed to the adoption of the custom from May festivals rather than some mainline back into our region's pagan past. So let us take that away, along with all those post-enlightenment traditions regarding the particulars of the well-dressing back- board; the use of clay is likely only present due to it being the most adaptable natural construction material available to the people of the region.
When we do, what we are left with is a focused, specific region of Britain consisting of less than 500 square miles, in which the primary bond of ritual is the veneration of the places where waters rise from the earth below. Once we clear the pomp and ceremony away, we see that well-dressing, ultimately, is not a ceremony of thanksgiving for the water supply at all. Rather, it is the veneration of the water source itself. Something which has held association in the peaks for more than 2000 years.
Holy Waters
In 43CE when Rome finally invaded Britain under the stewardship of general Aulus Plautius, the island was a patchwork of local kingdoms ruled by various Iron Age tribes, each with their own distinct customs and identities, unified only by an island-wide respect for the Druidic order that made for their highest forms of administration, law, and religious tradition. The successful conquest of Britain, although perhaps ultimately inevitable, would be far from straightforward. For every group that acquiesced to Roman rule, there was another which fancied its chances in an act of rebellion. Nonetheless, come 69CE the Roman curtain had extended up through the Midlands and now found itself also containing the lands we today know as the Peak District.
To cement their rule, successful settlement was not only dependent on military might and organisation, but also reliant on Roman willingness to adopt local practices, traditions, and rituals into its own canon of belief. The venerated sites of a tribe, and therefore their deities and gods, were central to this process. Rome, like Iron Age Britain, was a pagan culture with a polytheistic approach to worship. Acknowledging multiple gods and goddesses in relation to a territory was not only good politics, but it was also very much part of a genuine belief structure. In the pagan mind, a mountain, a river, even a simple group of rocks; they could all quite legitimately be overseen by a specific local deity tethered to their qualities and uses.
As Rome began to build trade and administrative networks throughout their new territory, they would typically utilise two key techniques. Those local populations that existed in an organised form that we might recognise as a town or village - typically groups of several hundred inhabitants centred on a hill fort or river plain - would be resettled into new, formulated, planned garrison-towns. The sooner this happened, the sooner the locals would get on board with the new rulers and the sooner, frankly, they would start paying tax. In addition to this, Rome needed to build forts at strategic points in the landscape, be them river crossings, mineral-rich geologies, or purely militaristic outposts. In the Peak District, this process had resulted in several new settlements.
There was Navio near Hope and Melandra, near the modern town of Glossop. Chief amongst them however was Aquis Arnemetia, where the Romans had discovered something quite extraordinary. It was a place with a unique feature that they would only find in one other location on the entire island; natural thermal springs. Today, that settlement is known as the town of Buxton. And as today with Buxton Water, Aquis Arnemetia (the waters of Arnemetia) would become famous the world over for the quality
of its spring water. Arnemetia was a Romano-British goddess of the sacred grove, a variation on a pre-roman indigenous local deity with whom the incoming Roman population struck up a bond. The new town soon began to prosper as a bath town, located at the confluence of several major roads including Batham Gate heading into South Yorkshire, The Street heading to Derby, and another route out through the Goyt Valley to Condate; modern-day Northwich.
During the 1970s, an excavation at the site of the Roman bath house - under what is today the Crescent - uncovered more than 200 Roman coins spanning almost 300 years of occupation in the town. In 122CE, Emperor Hadrian himself visited. So well established became Roman Buxton that more than 250 years after Roman forces retreated from Britain, the town was included in the Ravenna Cosmography - an atlas of all the places in the world known to Rome, from Ireland to India. I share this in case there should be any doubt as to what a big deal Roman Buxton really was.
That the springs were so enamouring to the incoming Romans was no surprise to the people of the peaks. Rising from a kilometre within the earth, the mineral water that reaches the surface at around 27C had been doing so for around 3000 years before the Romans arrived. The Celts had been venerating this place long before the Romans, and in fact a temple dedicated to Aeona, goddess of healing waters, was noted in the site of the Bath Gardens back in 1755. The springs had always been venerated; it’s just that the Romans made them famous throughout the wider world.
The sense of identity that Arnemetiae would give to both its immediate inhabitants and those also of the landscape around it is hard to overestimate. During the period in which the security of the wider region was still in flux, the goddess of the springs would have been a constant in the minds of the Romans. It is she to whom they would give their offerings and say their prayers. It is she that would protect them and give them spiritual succour. She was now their goddess. As travellers reached the town from Derby, Manchester, Chester, London even, they would have known they were entering the realm of the water goddess. The cult of Arnemetiae had been born. This process of assimilation was far from unusual.
Throughout the Roman Empire, it was precisely the way in which populations became synthesised between the old world and the new. There are thousands of examples of curse tablets, letters, and graffiti - from Anglesey in the West to Turkey in the East - etched by local Roman soldiers and their families, invoking the local gods and goddesses. For those living in outlying settlements across the Peak District, infusing their identity with the goddess Arnemetiae was the manner by which their communities tethered to the centralised world of Romano-Britain. Perhaps then it's a matter of logic that, when the goddess you worship is the associated with the spring waters, and the town that guarantees your safety is named after her, that your own local wellspring should be the most direct portal you have to foster that connection. That there would have been a closely tied culture of veneration between the spring water of Buxton and the spring water of the wells, shooting up from the earth across its surrounding landscape, is a striking possibility; and one to which I look in search of an origin to the ceremony central to this piece.
As time moved on, the Romans retreating in 473 CE and leaving behind the Romano- British communities that had grown and matured across the preceding 400 years, well veneration would have already begun its first transitions to the world of Romano- Christianity. Then, the incoming incursions of Angles, Danes, and Saxons that would eventually result in both the Dane-law of the northern peak frontier and the borderlands of Anglo-Saxon Mercia within it, would naturally once more impact the meaning of local rituals. For Pagans and Christians alike, the veneration of their holy water sites was perhaps one of the few rituals that all would have an interest in observing and therefore, preserving too.
A Rural Cult
At first, it may have appeared that we are dealing with rituals, beliefs, and customs that sit the better part of 2000 years apart; and that the history of the town of Buxton, built both figurative and very literally at the well of the goddess Arnemetiae, is little more than an interesting coincidence in relation to the lost origins of Peak District well- dressing. But, what a coincidence that would be. A local population tethered for more than 400 years to the image of a water goddess found present nowhere else in the entire Roman empire, becomes the only community in the whole of the British Isles to emerge with an annual local custom of veneration and appreciation for their local water well? The choice, if there is to be one at all, is the readers to make; but for me, well, I think this is precisely how folklore - or rather in this case, folk tradition - works. And I would leave you with this...
Outside of the Peak District, well dressing as a modern tradition may have crossed its neighbouring borders of the Staffordshire Moorlands at Endon and South Yorkshire at Wakley, but little further. That is, except for in the county of Somerset, some 200 miles to the Southwest of the peaks, where there is a small group of smilier rituals performed; all within a 15-mile radius of Bath, that other, more obviously named, spa town of Roman Britain. Where Buxton was once Aqua Arnemetiae, the city of Bath was once Aqua Sulis. The local population there too, via the mechanisms outlined here, would have an intrinsic affinity with their own god of the local spa town. That those areas of regional well-dressing should share so much provenance with central settlements famed for there waters...well, perhaps it isn’t that old habits die hard, maybe sometimes they don't die at all.
Eli Lewis-Lycett 2022