The Holy Well was marked at the edge of Rubery, so I began there, where urban begins to blend with rural. At the furthest reaches of Rubery’s great 1930s sprawl is Whetty Lane, a shadow-name from when this outlier was called “The Wetty”, a name which has now slipped out of use. This is the first hint that these are, historically as well as in the present, wet lands, as Wetty may derive from Old English wædige, meaning "wet" or "moist". Waseley too, the name of the nearby hills, likely stems from the old English wæsse or wæsc, probably meaning reedy. Imagine ground freckled with reeds and sedges, and with waters emerging from beneath the surface. Not just the possible Holy Well, but this land rouses the River Rea and multiple other trickles. Across the hills is also drawn the line of the watershed, where waters to the east all drain, eventually, to the Trent, and all those to the West get taken to the Severn. A realm of rivulets being born.
The Wetty contains several surviving coppices – remains of Rubery’s leafier past. Coppicing is a very old woodland management practice: branches were cut from trees in cycles, allowed to regrow, and this, ultimately, provided a steady supply of wood for multiple purposes whilst also maintaining a healthy and long-lived woodland. Whetty Coppice is designated as ancient woodland, albeit a managed one, and is cordoned off behind high railings to maintain it. Despite it being fenced off, though, you are still tree-bathed by the street names: Maple Road, Hazel Road, Birch Road.
After passing the tree-inspired groves, I slipped into the countryside through a small gap in the hawthorn hedge on Whettybridge Road. A disordered cluster of trees drew their branches round the pathway ahead, forming a dark portal into another old coppice. This was a hazel coppice. Left alone now, the splaying hazels had been joined by sporadic hawthorns, the children of those from the nearby hedge, which played hide and seek in the shadows. Hazel trees are almost shrub-like, so they form a low canopy; a forest in miniature. Yet, the cover is still substantial, and only fragments of dappled light break through to the damp, leafy earth below. At least in the summer, but this was February, and a mass of yellow hazel-catkins hung like fairy towels on leafless branches.
I would have been content exploring the maze of hazels and the hills above, but those words on the map marked a more elusive destination – the Holy Well itself, waiting somewhere beyond, so I pressed on.
Like the wetness entrenched in the watery place names, the Holy Well clings deep into the land through local names. Holywell Lane and Holywell Farm tell us that the well was here even without maps. The former, though, is not followable on foot. Instead, I found an old right of way through the sports ground, leading to another ancient woodland: Broadmoor Wood. Over a century ago, the Cadbury family bought this land to serve the leisure time of their workers: a place to ramble through fields and forests and learn about birds, insects and pondlife. They called the camp St. Oswald’s, apparently echoing a local story of a monk who had lived in a stone cell near the well and distributed its waters. Although the Cadbury's used the saintly prefix, Oswald was unlikely to be the saint who blessed these waters, though. St. Oswald was King of Northumbria, so the Oswald of local lore, if he existed, was more likely a hermit with the same name, drawn to waters already made holy.
Broadmoor Wood offered several potentials in my search for the Holy Well. Near a great, old hazel sprung a spring, heading deep into the forest. The site had been adorned with car tyres and traffic cones, but no obvious relics of past reverence. Another tyre, further along, was persuasive in presenting itself as the Holy Well: a perfect circle overgrown and absorbed into the land so completely that it initially seemed a sanctum of sorts. It was not. The further depths of Broadmoor Wood, too, were speckled with rising waters. The paths through the thicket narrowly perch on steep banks. At the base, the brook which rises at the hazel tree broadens, but with the rain that had previously fallen all was a slurry of mud. I slid amongst the trees and skidded over spring after spring, each adding their waters to the muddy channel, below. None offered themselves as more holy than the next.
Although no holy well was found in the wood, the village beyond, Chadwich, provides a clue to who might have blessed the waters, if anyone ever did. Chadwich is Chad’s, or Ceadda's, settlement (wic), and St. Chad was Bishop of Mercia in the seventh century. Other wells are linked to St. Chad, most notably in the grounds of St. Chad’s Church in Lichfield, where the saint is supposedly buried, and in Chadwell in Staffordshire, both thought to be blessed by the saint through prayer. Myths, however, do not stay still – they move and metamorphose. So perhaps the iron-rich spring near Rubery was once blessed by the travelling Saint Chad, or instead consecrated only by local lore.
None of the saintly stories that have gathered around the well helped me to locate it. This, after much searching, I slowly realised would require traversing a wire fence, wading through the tall grass of an overgrown field, and up to a farm track, technically trespassing. Thousands came to chalybeate waters like these, seeking cures to their ills or a blessing. I joined their ranks, hoping to find something equally as elusive. At the edge of the track, the roots of a field maple clutched a steep, dusty slope. Its bark was a dusty orange – sediment from drinking iron-rich water, I wondered.
Beneath the tree the land shifted to a more vibrant green. A tiny bubbling of water glistened, rising from the ground, chattering with the low winter sun. It gently swelled then flowed downhill along the field boundary: a route lined with hawthorns - their roots laid bare along the line of the infant brook. Where it rose, the barely rippling water teemed with brooklime – true to its name glowing vivid green. This water looked no more sacred than any other that I had found that day, but this was not just another trickle on the wet hills of Waseley. Near to the source was a crumbling, stone pool with a metal grate on top. An off-white plastic bucket hung inside, clearly left unused for many years, but likely once plunged within to extract the saint-blessed waters. It was long abandoned, except maybe for use by the farmer, but on the silent slope, away from the world and any chance of meeting other pilgrims, this felt slightly like sanctuary. I left my offering in exchange for a vial of the saintly nectar.
Although only one of these hillside springs was proclaimed holy, the whole landscape seems sacred. This is land that brings forth water at each turn, as if the strata beneath had been pricked with pins. Ancient people, likely even before saints were anointed, must have seen this land as mythically alive. Not quite ordinary.
