St Aldhelm's Well

A peaceful, secluded healing spring that has kept its pre-Christian character despite its Christian dedication. Pilgrims and modern 'water gatherers' still visit to drink and collect the water and to leave flowers and other offerings; many describe the water as 'alive' – carrying memory and consciousness – and prefer it to the calcified White Spring at Glastonbury. The spring is said never to have failed even in times of drought, and the site lies on the St Aldhelm's Way and Glastonbury Water Way pilgrim routes. It is a quiet place for reflection and reverence at the very source of the Sheppey, where the sacred and the working landscape meet.

St Aldhelm's Well is an ancient spring at Doulting, near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, which rises beneath the parish church and forms the source of the River Sheppey. It is named after Aldhelm – Abbot of Malmesbury and first Bishop of Sherborne, and a renowned poet, scholar and theologian – who died in the village in 709; tradition holds he sat by the spring singing psalms shortly before his death, after which his body was carried in stages to Malmesbury Abbey for burial. Long regarded as a healing well whose waters have never been known to fail, even in drought, it drew pilgrims who bathed in and drank from it. Water issues from two low pointed stone arches set into the hillside, runs along a shallow channel, and fills a stone trough in the lane below before passing on. The surviving structure is largely a medieval site rebuilt in later centuries and is Grade II listed. In 1850 the spring was re-routed to drive the waterwheels of a family-owned forge that produced edge tools – billhooks, axes and blades for the region's agriculture and mining – until the works closed around 1905. From here the water tumbles down the Mendip slopes as the River Sheppey, running some fifteen to twenty miles to join the River Brue near Glastonbury.