Key

CH: = Participant, Claire Heron
J: = Interviewer, Julia
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[IA 5:22] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

CH: Well, I grew up on a farm in old Westmorland, down near Sedbergh, and I’m very lucky that I grew up drinking wild water off the fell, and I think that had a big influence on me, actually. We had the River Lune running along the bottom of the fields and we used to go down swimming there. So I was drinking good, wild water out of the tap and swimming in good, wild water. The bath, obviously, coming from the same fell water. So for me, that was what water was: it was something natural, not messed about with by people. And it wasn’t until I grew up and went to live in cities that I understood that water’s not all good. The water that comes out of the tap in London doesn’t taste very nice and it’s not very refreshing. So over the years, I became more interested in natural water. My mother was a good influence on me; she was quite interested in holy wells and she told me about where different holy wells were and took me to different places. Now, here I am approaching 60 and I’m living within about 100 yards of a holy well and it’s the holy well that is the source of the river that I grew up on, which feels very nice indeed. So that’s St Helen’s Well at Newbiggin-on-Lune. It’s not the highest source of the River Lune but it’s the source that is renowned for never drying up, even in the driest sun. So that’s there, bubbling up; comes over a little beck past our house, and there we are. So I’m very interested in holy wells as a thing and some people think that it’s a kind of dead tradition, which is only alive in Ireland and Cornwall and places like that. But actually, even here in Cumbria, we’ve got hundreds of holy wells.

J: I asked you earlier about what makes a holy well different from just a spring. Can you just tell us about that?

CH: Well, most people would agree that a holy well has to have some tradition, whether it’s written or oral tradition, of either being a place of healing or of miracles or of saintly association. So here in Cumbria, we’ve got quite a few wells that are connected with St Kentigern and he was on his ministry mission, moving around various places in north Cumbria, particularly. So there are a few wells dedicated to him and that’s more to do with him using the water for baptism. So other people would say that all wells and springs are holy because water itself is holy. I can go along with that up to an extent but if you’re focusing your attention on holy wells, it kind of gives some limits to the scope of your interest. Otherwise, there’s wells and springs cropping up everywhere. I think it’s good to have a relationship with the wells and springs that are close to where you live, whether or not they’ve got a tradition that you know about. I like to encourage people to find out where they live in relation to their watersheds, where the water that rains on their land flows to, what rivers does it meet, where does it flow out to sea, where are the springs, where does the water rise when it’s been raining a lot and there’s not a spring there normally. Just to get a feel of the water in the land.

J: Why do you think that’s so important for people to do that? ‘cause I bet a lot of people haven’t thought about that, but now I’m thinking about it. Why do you feel that’s really important?

CH: I think that culturally, we’ve lost our way. The world’s a mess, our political systems are a mess and if you get involved in that world, of thinking, ‘What’s right and what’s wrong?’, you’re just going to head for a world of arguments. So what have we all got in common? Where does healthy culture come from, what’s it rooted in? And for me, it’s rooted in our connection with the land and with the waters. We all depend on the land for our food and for our water and for fuel and air and everything, so that’s not really something that we’re going to argue about ideologically. We might argue about how we go about that but the nuts and bolts and the bare bones of it is that we depend on the water and the earth for our wellbeing. So for us to create our own direct relationship with the water that we live near, with the earth that we live on is… it’s something about becoming more rooted and grounded in our own tradition and in culture, creating links with the earth and with water, but with each other as well. It’s something that we all depend on and we can connect through that.

J: Would you like people to reconnect with holy wells particularly? Go and visit them or…? Like you were telling me about the tradition in Penrith, the shaking bottle .

CH: Yeah, so this is a great story because Cumbria Wildlife Trust recently were bequeathed some land and this land has on it a traditional holy well called Dickey Bank Well or Cold Springs, I think is another name. And it’s one of the wells round Penrith that is associated with this tradition called ‘shaking bottle Sunday’. Every Sunday in May, there was a well around Penrith where people would go, and there would be a fair and merrymaking. And they would put liquorice root in the water and shake it up and it would froth up and then taste good as well and then it would be drunk, and that’s part of the merrymaking. Unfortunately, some time in the 1800s, the Church banned these things because people were being too boisterous and too naughty. So these traditions have died out but in the big scheme of things, it’s not that long ago. So I was talking to the owner of one of these wells, a few years ago before COVID, and we actually went and did shaking bottle there on his well, which was the first Sunday in May. And it’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re bringing this tradition back to life!’ and he was very excited about it. And then COVID happened and things got lost in the tides of change. But then Cumbria Wildlife Trust were bequeathed this land with this well and the lady who’s Public Engagement Officer or something, she wants to get people to engage with the well. So she was overjoyed to find that the well is there and that it’s got this tradition with it and she’s very keen on just re-establishing that tradition and inviting the community in to celebrate the well being there, which I think is wonderful.

J: Water has been associated with wellbeing for so long. Do you think that’s also something which we’ve lost?

CH: I think people know it intuitively, almost. What do you do if you’re feeling tired? Go and lay in the bath for a while. Or you have a shower if you want to renew your energy and just wash off the worries of the day. Or you go for a walk by the river. So I think we know it in our molecules but we don’t know it in our minds so much, and it’s good to remember that; just to spend time with the water and, if you can, spend time with water in nature. Stand by the river, listen to the sound of the river, watch the kingfishers and dippers flying up and down. I love it – it’s so renewing, so refreshing.

J: We had a little walk down, earlier, round our Crowdundle Beck.

CH: Yeah, I love it. It’s beautiful, and at the moment, with all the snowdrops coming through, it’s fantastic. And you were saying about how the mood of the beck really picks up after rain because it’s got quite a steep gradient in a short distance, and I really had a sense of that. Although it’s not flooding at the moment, there’s still a sense of the power in that water. I was remembering as well that there’s a holy well up at Milburn, which is on the Crowdundle, isn’t it? So there’s a holy well just there, near the church, which now is, unfortunately, just a kind of quagmire. It’s basically a bog next to the stream. But that is recorded as being a place of pilgrimage in the medieval times, and miracles I think, possibly going back as far as the Saxon time, if I’m not mistaken. So you think about holy water, if it’s flowing out of a well or a spring into the beck, then the beck’s carrying holy water. So whether or not there’s a holy well here at Acorn Bank, there’s certainly water from a holy well flowing past it.

J: And you have some water dowsers with you. How do they work?

CH: Yes, I’ve found holy wells but not just going out in the land and saying, ‘Is there a holy well nearby?’ Doing some research, looking at old maps, reading old accounts. For instance, there’s a holy well lost outside of Carlisle. No one knew about it for 100 years or something but we went there, there was quite a bit of overgrowth, thought where it should be, ‘Yes, it's gonna be there,’ with the dowsers, and there it was, by golly! This great stone structure with a gap in that you could see and the water was there. It was fantastic, yeah.

J: So how do they work? ‘cause I’ve never seen them in action, as it were.

CH: Ah, this is the million-dollar question but I’ve left them in the car now as well. So if you think about animals who have a sense of direction that’s based on a magnetic field. Animals know where they’re going. We don’t exactly understand how that works but the suggestion is that as human beings, we have capacities and senses that aren’t the normal five senses that we talk about. So my way of understanding it is that we are electromagnetic beings, that’s without a doubt. Our hearts are basically electrical pumps and we have a magnetic field and the planet has its own electromagnetic field and the sun has an electromagnetic field that impacts us from time to time, more or less, and water has an electromagnetic field. It flows and the friction and all these things, and geology has an electromagnetic field; if you have crystalline rocks pushing against each other, there’s a thing called piezoelectricity that creates light and a charge. So my theory is that our electromagnetic field interacts with the electromagnetic field of the earth and that’s picked up with an instrument, whether that’s dowsing rods or a pendulum. Or some people can just do it with their body; they feel it with their hands or in their belly. So yeah, but people still do it as well. We’ve had the United Utilities people coming out looking for pipes and leaks, they have dowsing rods with them. Yeah well, I should’ve given you a go on them, really.

J: Yeah, that would’ve been so exciting, yeah.

CH: Well, I haven’t said that we are bodies of water and that feels important. We’re not just here looking at water as something out there. They say that the human body is two thirds water – that’s an average. So when you think that the bones are probably… I can’t remember the figures but it’s low, 30 or 40%. Lungs are about 90% water, which is fascinating. So every breath, every word we speak has got our water in it.

J: We’ve got to take care of it, haven’t we?

CH: Yeah, absolutely. It’s fundamental to us in every way – spiritually, physically, emotionally so helpful. Mental health all that, yeah.

J: We were talking about the water flowing, taking thoughts, weren’t we? Does it have a consciousness? That was a really interesting thing.

CH: Oh, yes. Well, we could talk about this for a long time. There’s some people doing research. There was a Japanese guy called Doctor Emoto, who started experimenting by freezing water. He would take samples of water from industrial effluent, for example, and pristine mountain streams, freeze them and compare the crystalline formations of the freezing. The industrial effluent looked terrible – very murky, not clear crystals. Beautiful mountain streams – very clear, crisp, beautiful, symmetrical crystals. Then, he experimented with taking effluent water and having it blessed by a priest. Then the crystals from the freezing became beautiful, symmetrical. So he experimented with lots of different things – playing different sorts of music to water, looking at how the frozen crystals came out, using different words for the water. So if you curse water, the crystals go pretty horrible, if you bless it, it goes nice, if you say, ‘thank you’, the crystals are good. So he was the sort of forerunner in this freezing water and examining it field, and now there’s a woman called Veda Austin, who is a New Zealand researcher and she is working with water in this freezing way but she’s taken it in a different direction. She is trying to develop something… I think she calls it hydroglyphs, where when the water freezes, she’s identifying symbols within it and trying to get to a way of communicating with it through these symbols. Which is fascinating but when you think about the effect that a curse or a blessing has on water, and then coming back to our own bodies, our culture is very down on people’s bodies, isn’t it? People normally are not blessing their bodies; they’re going, ‘I want it to be different.’ So that’s something that I do, when I’m having a little meditative time, I bless the water in my own body. I tried to get into this stuff that Veda Austin is doing, I find it fascinating. I desperately tried to get to her talk in Kendal last year and the universe conspired to not let me go there. And I’ve tried a few times to do this freezing thing and I’m not really interested in it, it’s kind of weird. I’ve realised that for me, my relationship with water is more about relating to it in motion, in nature, not in the freezer. It’s the flow, isn’t it? The electromagnetic flow, the water carries something. It’s magic. I know people talk about wild swimming a lot and I kind of laugh and go, ‘Wild swimming – it's swimming!’ You know? .

J: How it used to be before we put it in a tank .

CH: Yeah, exactly. Put it in a tank full of chlorine – no thanks! That’s chemical swimming! I’ll have normal swimming.