MONTHLY UPDATE FROM SIMON

July 2025

Dear Friends

Later this month Fiona and I will be spending a week in Wales.  We’ll be staying in the Vale of Clwyd, which is a part that we know reasonably well, not far from the farm where our dogs come from.  Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his happiest years in Clwyd, at St Beuno’s College, and wrote some of his most famous poems there, including, ‘God’s Grandeur’, ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘The Windhover’.

It's an area noted for its sacred wells, which I always find mysteriously attractive.  One of the most famous is St Winefride’s Well at Holywell in Flintshire, which is a Catholic national shrine, sometimes called ‘the Lourdes of Wales’.  Last time we went there it was pouring with rain and very cold, but there was a group of pilgrims immersed to their waists, including some teenage girls who were clearly taking it very seriously.

Very different from St Winefride’s is a well near Denbigh, called St Dyfnog’s.  It’s a secluded place, reached by a footpath through the trees from the fine parish church.  Few people visit it.  But in the Middle Ages it attracted many pilgrims, one visitor speaking of “a bath, much frequented, the water heals scabs, itches etc, some say that it would cure the pox.”  Quite a reputation!

What should we make of sacred wells and springs?  Most obviously they are places to celebrate the gift of water, which is a commodity that we have too long taken for granted.  There is something particularly beautiful about seeing water gushing from a natural spring or bubbling up in a well, and we should be thankful for the clean water on which we depend for our most basic needs.

Wells are also reminders of our baptism, and of the new life held out to us in Christ.  The Book of Revelation speaks of ‘the water of the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb’, and water is an obvious symbol of spiritual refreshment.  When I stand by a well, I’m reminded of Horatius Bonar’s beautiful lines:

I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold I freely give
The living water; thirsty one, stoop down and drink, and live.’
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, and now I live in Him.

And wells and springs are, for so many people, places of healing and renewal.  This country has its fair share of spa towns – Leamington, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Buxton, Harrogate, and so on – where for centuries people have been restored to health by ‘taking the waters’.  And we also have the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, whose well soothes the wounds, physical or mental, of the countless pilgrims who visit each year.

Here in Sussex there are very few sacred wells, but we do, of course, have lots of springs, particularly here at the foot of the Downs.  The decorative ponds of South Gardens are no doubt fed with water from deep within the chalk, bound eventually for the Rother, the Arun and the sea.  And I think of the delightful village spring at Fulking, just over the Downs from Brighton, which is marked with an inscription from Psalm 104:

‘He sendeth springs into the valleys which run among the hills.

Oh, that men would praise the Lord for his goodness.’

With my prayers for you all,

Simon