A Story of a Hare, the Cailleach and a Well

The well at the bottom of the hill

Death is beginning to stalk the land. Great sheets of rain are drawing across the hills in veils, and the temperature is dropping.

We are cycling towards Autumn Equinox and the great descent of the year into the darkness. 

Death also comes in another form, the anniversary of the death of my younger brother, over ten years ago now.

I mark most cycles of the wheel by visiting my favorite hill, a place I’ve been visiting even before I could walk. From the town below I like to walk certain streets just to get a glimpse of this view from different angles. And yet I can’t believe I have never walked around the reservoir that lies at the foot of the hill, the main reason being I usually take to the hills to be alone and so choose not to have to walk by people fishing. 

A few weeks ago I decided to change all of that and take the looping path around the reservoir. Walking by the side of the adjacent field I suddenly saw something dash across the field, stop suddenly, and then dart back in the opposite direction: a hare! How wonderful to see this amazing creature.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

This hill is the first place I ever experienced the ‘otherness’ of the land, of being in a place where worlds seem to merge and ancient presences make themselves known. This is where I first heard the voice of the Cailleach, who always makes herself known in one form or another - and here is the old woman bounding across the field in her hare form.

There is much folklore of hares thought to be stealing milk from cows and so farmers would shoot hares with a silver bullet. Following the trail of drops of blood often led them to a cottage with an elderly woman nursing her injury by the fire.

Mama at the Well

As we walked around the reservoir, which is a man-made loch, most likely only a few hundred years old we came across a well.

The well has been set by some great thick sandstone blocks, the water coming above ground along the path flowing southeast and eventually joining the reservoir.

I had known there was a well around somewhere but it doesn’t appear on the modern OS (Ordnance Survey) map. The first map it did appear on was around 1820. But the water flowed before 1820, before the man-made reservoir, and before the man-made loch before that.

The people who lived atop Carman Hill in the Dark Age Fort (AD 400-900) knew about the spring. The animals who lived here knew about the spring. The spring could well be flowing for thousands of years.

I wasn’t looking for the well, the well found me. It’s profoundly changed and deepened my relationship with this place. Its flowing waters are a reminder of the Well Maidens who tended to these sacred places offering a cup of their holy waters to those who sought shelter on pilgrimage. 

Their story, of rape and retreating back into the otherworld is for another time but in a world that desperately needs new stories to weave us back to our place within the land the well becomes part of my cultural myths and symbols of the Ancestral Mothers.