I will now give a few extracts to show what goes on at present in certain localities with regard to the offerings, and the frame of mind of the devotees.
With reference to the reasons for the offerings made in the present day, Wood-Martin writes:[73]
“Wells were the haunts of spirits that proved to be propitious if remembered, but were vindictive if neglected, and hence no devotee approached the sacred precincts empty-handed, the principle being no gift no cure; therefore the modern devotee, when tying up a fragment from the clothing, or dropping a cake, a small coin, or a crooked pin into the well, is unconsciously worshipping the old presiding spirit of the place.”
Rhys[74] gives us a great deal of information on this. The ritual varies at some of them. People came from far and near; it is the custom to make some sort of offering, rags and pins being the most modern, and about these we have most information as a matter of course.
Rhys quotes statements he has received about three wells in the county of Glamorgan (Vol. 1, p. 356). At the first it was the custom “that the person who wishes his health to be benefited should wash in the water of the well, and throw a pin into it afterwards.” At another “the custom prevails of tying rags to the branches of a tree growing close at hand”; and at the third, “it is the custom for those who are healed in it to tie a shred of linen or cotton to the branches of a tree that stands close by; and there the shreds are almost as numerous as the leaves.”
Further (p. 363) we read of another Ffynnon Faglan, and of this Rhys says, “One told me his mother used to take him to it when he was a child for sore eyes, bathe them with the water, and then drop in a pin. The other man, when he was young, bathed in it for rheumatism.” Of this well it is recorded that when it was cleaned out about fifty years ago “two basinfuls of pins were taken out,” which were all bent, but no coins were found in it.
Wood-Martin[75] also gives an interesting account of the rite performed at a certain well in Ireland; it is a little more elaborate than at some, but affords an idea of what was probably at one time a very usual ceremony in connection with stones in other places.
“In a statistical account of the parish of Dungiven, written in 1813, it is stated that at the well of Tubberpatrick, after performing the usual rounds, devotees wash their hands and feet with the water and tear off a small rag from their clothes, which they tie on a bush overhanging the well; from whence they all proceed to a large stone in the River Roe, immediately below the old church, and having performed an oblation they walk round the stone, bowing to it, and repeating prayers as at the well. Their next movement is to the old church, within which a similar ceremony goes on, and they finish this rite by a procession and prayers round the upright stone.”
5. Time of the chief festival.
—On this point there is not a great quantity of precise information, but what we have points to May 1 as being about the time when the holy wells are most frequented and considered most efficacious.