Pagan rites
Roy Hattersley
Ashford-in-the-Water has beaten us to it. Their well-dressing service was last Sunday. Ours is still weeks away. Most of us are far too genteel to let our annoyance show. And few of my neighbours would openly admit that there is rivalry — even less competition between the neighbouring villages. But pinning a poster on our noticeboard was a provocative act.
We are taking temporary consolation from the discovery that the ceremony is to be followed by an exhibition of sheepdipping. Not at all the sort of thing that we would permit to follow our act of worship. But we do take well dressing seriously. Until it begins, summer has not really come to our part of the world. Over the next month, well heads and market squares all over the Peak District will be decorated with pictures — usually made by the local schools — from petals and pebbles, leaves and twigs. It must be work at which ten-year-olds excel, for they produce masterpieces of imagination and design. After a couple of weeks, they fade and die. Gerard Manley Hopkins would have understood our grief at their unleaving. It is ourselves we mourn for.
The service of blessing, before the well dressings are unveiled — indeed the well dressings themselves — are expressions of our thanks for water. In limestone country, streams and springs come and go. Tradition dictates that a grateful people should celebrate the mercies of a benevolent god who never — at least rarely — lets the wells run dry. Four years ago, Gore Vidal was staying at my house when the vicar — attended by the church choir, the parish council and various village notables — crowned the Sunday School queen and then blessed a spectacular picture of Noah, his ark and a number of its passengers. Gore thought it necessary to tell them that, far from being an act of Christian worship, well dressing is a pagan rite intended to propitiate the angry gods of drought. There was even some suggestion that they would not be satisfied unless the Sunday School queen was offered up in sacrifice.
That only added to my feeling of guilt about our well dressing. The nearest well to the village green is under the flagstones in my kitchen. The careful brickwork, descending further than the eye can see, is still in perfect condition. At least it was when last observed. The county council, always solicitous about our health, insisted that it should be sealed off, to protect us from being killed in our beds by radon the gas which limestone exudes. My plan to have a transparent plastic cover with green DayGlo polythene frogs clinging to the well walls was vetoed by the domestic, as distinct from the local, authority.
The village manages very well with its well dressing on dry land immediately in front of the war memorial. And I have no doubt that this year — as last, and as long as anyone can remember — it will be a tribute to the school which made it and a credit to the village which it adorns.
It was in that confident spirit that I set off for Ashford-in-the-Water to discover what its residents had managed to cobble together by such an early date. There it was — right opposite the village shop behind a disused cast-iron pump — a picture of a squirrel surrounded by the Boy Scouts fleur-de-lys and the legend ‘Fun and Friendship’. Beautiful, I said to myself. Beautiful, but small.
It was then that a passing hiker asked if I could direct him to the other six well dressings which were located in the village. We searched for them together. In front of the hotel there was a picture of Christ restoring a blind man’s sight in between Corinthian columns which were depicted with the detail of a Florentine master. Round the corner, there was a tribute to A.A. Milne — Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin side by side, surrounded by medallion portraits of their friends. The other three were executed with equal precision. It reminded me of a variation on the joke. Imagine what God could have done with leaves and flowers if he had been able to spare the time.
No doubt my village will rise to the challenge next month. But perhaps we should, like Ashford-in-the-Water, add a special attraction. Sheep-dipping has been done. What could we do with our herd of prize Charolais?
© Roy Hattersley 2006
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