A Book of Cornwall

by S. Baring-Gould

Domnhal, king of Ireland, sent his servants to collect goose-eggs. They found a woman carrying a black basket on her head piled up with the eggs of geese. The king's servants demanded them, but she answered that they were intended as a present to Erc, who spent the day immersed to the armpits in running water, with his Psalter on the bank, from which he recited the psalms. In the evening he emerged from his bath, shook himself, and ate an egg and a half together with three bunches of watercress.

However, regardless of the saint's necessities, the servants carried the eggs away.

When S. Erc came out of the river, dripping from every limb, and found there were no eggs for his supper, he waxed warm, and roundly cursed the rascals who had despoiled him, and those who had set them on, and all such as should eat them.

The story goes on to tell how these eggs became veritable apples of discord, breeding internecine strife.

But to return to the wells.

Whether taught by experience, or illumined by the light of nature, I cannot say, but most assuredly the saints of Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall were vastly particular as to their wells being of the purest and coldest water obtainable.

S. Senan had settled for a while by a well in Inis Caorach, and one day his disciple Setna--our Cornish Sithney--found a woman washing her child's dirty clothes in the fountain. He flew into a fury, and his companion Liberius was equally abusive in the language employed. Shortly after the boy tumbled over the rocks into the sea. The distracted mother ran to S. Senan, and when he heard the circumstances, assuming that this was due to the imprecations called down on the woman and her child by his two pupils, he bade both of them depart and not see his face again, unless the child should be produced uninjured. Setna and Liberius sneaked away very disconsolate, but as they happily found the lad on the beach uninjured, they were once more received into favour.

It is unnecessary here to repeat all the hackneyed references to the cult of fountains among the Celts; they may be taken for granted. We know that such was the case, and that the same cult continues very little altered among the Irish and Breton peasantry to the present day. In Cornwall there is now little or none of it. "When I was a man I put away childish things," says S. Paul, and the same applies to peoples. When they are in their cultural childhood they have their superstitious beliefs and practices; but they grow out of them, and we pity those who stick in the observance of usages that are unreasonable.

In pagan times money was dropped into wells and springs, and divination was taken from the rising of bubbles. Now the only relic of such a proceeding is the dropping in of pins or rush crosses.

Wells were also sought for curative purposes, and unquestionably some springs have medicinal qualities, but these are entirely unconnected with the saints, and depend altogether on their chemical constituents.