When we do find the well it is – inevitably – a little disappointing. Perhaps because the image in my head is a composite from Cornish Druid websites that haven’t been updated in the last decade and a half, or perhaps because this is my sixth attempt at hunting down The Fairy Well, not including one admittedly rather abortive approach by kayak. It hasn’t helped that this particular pagan well is a.k.a. the Carbis Bay Well.
Unhelpful indeed, that each set of directions is firmly decided that the well overlooks Carbis Bay, and yet here I stand over it (the well) to find it sits decidedly over Lelant (the next bay over). It seems such a monumental gaffe that even my Dad, born and raised in Redruth and a venerable member of expedition no. five, is baffled into defeat. The fact that attempts one through four haven’t reached Carbis Bay to discover this error does not placate the other intrepid members of expedition five – or, as I now remember it: expedition-last-but-one.
On that occasion we had just peered round the headland past Carbis Bay when the skies opened and we called it a day. On the promise that we diligently beat around for any hidden paths radiating strong well-vibes, we turned back. From reading ShamanicDowsing.com, you might’ve thought any portals to the pixy world would be unmissable, but no luck. Since that walk, the true location of Carbis Bay has taken on a new and rather unexpected significance. Boris Johnson has chosen it to host the G7 Summit this Summer. The spotlight hasn’t shone so near the Fairy Well since the Reformation, when iconoclasts whirled through Cornwall shattering obelisks and way-churches. Holy Pagan Wells across the country were stopped up and it was only thanks to the erstwhile spirit of Cornish independence – which shows its dogged face today in pasty-shaped bumper stickers – that so many survived on this isolated tip of England. Such a passionately furious response to pagan sites of worship which seem innocuous to most of us is today only matched by the earnest study of neo-druids meeting in Cornish pubs from Bodmin and Bude to Penzance and back again.
But anyone who has childhood memories of summer afternoons at the beach can surely understand. Digging through the sand – to make a sandcastle, to build a moat against the sea, to throw at little brothers – the ground becomes darker, but it’s not a shadow at the bottom of the hole. If you make it past the first dry. warm layer, the sand begins to feel heavier and more tightly packed under your fingernails until, suddenly, it loosens and water begins to seep between your fingers.
It’s a magical moment. It is also confounding and deeply frustrating. Picture: Seven-Year-Old Dan has just spent half an hour building an immortal monument to his control over the water, only to find the salty wet stuff has been sitting smugly beneath him all this time. Even worse, it has turned his triumph of engineering into a slurry and Dad will never fit in this collapsed excuse for a hole now. He paws at what has become essentially a puddle for half a minute before resigning in disgrace. This activity has become uninteresting and it is time to go home. He feels certain Dad will share his passionate frustration and, flicking sand on his eyelids to wake Dad up, Seven-Year-Old Dan is not wrong.
The three stages of well-grief: confusion, anger, acceptance
It could be a particularly idiosyncratic pub quiz question: what do 16th-century Iconoclasts, pub-wise Pagans and children at the beach have in common? But a more interesting question is why such a fascination with wells should elude the rest of us. Battle images of land cutting into the sea, waves beating the shore, and rocks bombing into the water all communicate the essential antagonism between earth and water.
By his 23rd birthday Albert Camus had already bored of hanging out on the beach and was more interested in watching other people swim and run and play. Looking out into the water from the North Coast of Africa he mused that ‘Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound.’ Cornwall is indeed a ‘privileged place’: a whole county ‘on the sea.’ From his vantagepoint at the edge of England, adopted Cornishman and poet W. S. Graham could see an entire world watered by ‘the seven wounds’ or seas.
It's hard to see the relationship between land and water as violently as a ‘wound:’ the relationship between opened flesh and air. The sense of immediacy conjured even by the idea of a cut and its dripping blood doesn’t seem to scale to the deep time of eroding coastlines and beaches. But the difference is just as fundamental and goes some way to explaining the mystery of wells. A dozen odd years after Camus’ beach holiday, Auden was lecturing about the sea: its appearance and symbolic use from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Moby Dick. Auden is interested in pairing down the specifics of different texts to find the sea’s fundamental cultural meaning, so he can build that understanding back into the books he begins with. At its most calcified the difference is between ‘the desert’ and ‘the sea’: dry and wet, over and under, earth and water. Separated in pre-history: ‘a firmament in the midst of the waters’ both to ‘divide the waters from the waters’ and ‘the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament’ (useful information for Seven-Year-Old Dan). So simple it only needs stating once and right at the beginning: ‘it was so.’
No wonder, then, that wells should possess such a fascinating combination of unsettling magic. Far away from the coast water is flowing out of the earth and, what’s more, flowing utterly peacefully, without any of the obscene thrashing and spitting of the stormy coast. Wells are a calm and beautiful wound, like the medieval symbol of maternal care: a pelican feeding chicks its own blood. Like, indeed, the felix culpa of Catholic theology: a happy mistake mixing transgression and mystic hope. I remember from A-Level English the time we spent on this moment of Paradise Lost, precisely because Milton gives up his torturously long syntax for just a moment and spends no time at all:
Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound;
Perhaps wells are held especially dear in Cornwall not only because they have survived in unusual number, but because they represent a less permanent trade off between land and sea. Smack between two beaches in St Ives is the curiously named ‘Island’ – curious precisely because it is not an island. Fittingly The Castle on The Island is not a castle but a church. The Island may once have been an island and the castle a fort, but the waves have since moulded it into a peninsula. On the opposite coast is a famous island in disguise: everyday St. Michaels Mount finds and loses again its causeway tethering the castle to land – a curiously floating fortress which famously made a handy hideout for Tudor rebel Perkin Warbeck.
When God split land and sea he made Cober a river and Loe its mouth, but since then the sea has plastered up the wound. Now Loe pool is now the largest freshwater pond in Cornwall and – 20 metres away across a sand bar – the sea churns in particularly unpredictable swirls and eddies. Cornwall is a landscape where land and sea haven’t quite settled their terms and wells swell up to calmly wound the firmament: a silent battle trading blows in deep ecological time.
I’ve been reading a long poem by Derek Walcott which seems to find the words for a similar kind of watery world. Omeros helped Walcott win a Nobel Prize in 1992 but, for whatever reason, goes scarcely read today – perhaps in part because it clocks in at an intimidating 300+ pages. I’ve been “teaching” it to a group of children, though, whose first impression was of its remarkable calmness. A fisherman is performing to tourists:
For some extra silver, under a sea-almond,
he shows them a scar made my a rusted anchor,
rolling one trouser-leg up with the rising moan
of a conch. It has puckered like the corolla
of a sea-urchin. He does not explain its cure.
“It have some things” – he smiles – “worth more than a dollar.”
Later this same scar is ‘like a radiant anemone’; chainsaws becomes sharks ‘with sideways jaw’ to send woodchips ‘flying like mackerel over water’; trees literally becomes canoes – all under ‘the waves of blue hills.’ This reads like an English teacher’s dream: a pattern of imagery with a clear effect, magic poetry ripe for dissection in simple prose. Before long even the poem’s title is lost to the waves:
‘an O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.’
Walcott is writing about his birthplace, the Caribbean island of St Lucia, but I (and I am biased) hear Cornwall. ‘Now over the pastures of bananas, the island lifted its horns.’ Apart from the bananas, Cornwall is its own kind of horned island, carving into the sea like a tusk: its name an anglicisation of Kernow, from the Cornish for ‘horn’, kern. ‘Privileged places’ all: Algiers, St Lucia, St Ives – where water colours outside the lines.
So, if Johnson has inadvertently chosen for the G7 summit a small bay where place makes up the very language, perhaps the delegates will see clearly the stakes for protecting blues spaces everywhere. Maybe. Johnson is not known for his delicate linguistic touch and there’s a significant chance that delegates will likely never even make it to Carbis Bay and the summit will go virtual. But if they do meet then perhaps they will feel a little of the watery power that Walcott’s fishermen live off:
When, before their hands gripped the gunwales, they stood
for the sea-width to enter them, feeling their day begin.
