All images and text are Copyright 2003 Terry Faull.

The area covered by the Tarka Country has been subject to a number of traumatic

Cultural and religious influences and an appreciation of these may help us understand the origins of many of the recorded Holy Well sites. This part of Britain was at the edge of Roman influence in these islands, it was greatly influenced by the traffic of early Christian travellers between Ireland, Wales and the European mainland in the 4th – 6^th centuries and it was conquered late by the Anglo-Saxons. The boundary between Devon and Cornwall was not fixed until the 10^th century and the isolation of the area meant that many old customs and traditions lingered here long after they had been forgotten elsewhere.

The Celts who occupied this area at the time of Roman Britain (AD 43-410) had already been here for several hundred years when the Romans first arrived. A central feature of Celtic mythology was the cult of water worship. Water bubbling out of the ground at a spring is an elemental force; it is easy to see how such places could be thought of as a “portal” place between the everyday and the unknown worlds beyond human influence and time. Certain sites seem to have attracted the offering of gifts and acquired a reputation for healing or as oracles of future events and fortune. The spirit of these waters was often represented as a fish or eel ( this was not unique to Celtic folklore and similar traditions are found throughout Europe and also in some North American, Pacific and Indian cultures).

The coming of the Romans changed Britain and influenced the peoples of Tarka Country. However, Roman society was primarily military and urban or based on large estates and it had limited impact in the countryside at this far edge of Roman Britain. Their administrative centre at Isca (Exeter) was distant and it seems likely that the Romans left local chiefs and society largely in control. Christianity came to Britain during the Roman occupation. While it is uncertain how this new religion reached beyond Exeter or survived after the withdrawal of Roman protection in AD 410, evidence from elsewhere suggests that much of Western Britain was influenced by a form of Christianity by AD 500.

The end of Roman Britain was in some ways, the beginning of several centuries of flowering for Celtic Western Britain. Saxon mercenaries and later settlers brought a pagan influence to northern, eastern and southern Britain but around the Irish Sea, a Celtic and Christian influenced society not only survived but flourished. This was the age of Irish, Welsh and Cornish Saints; their version of Christianity represented a different approach to the centralised dogma of Rome and owed much to an affinity with the world of nature inherited from their Celtic traditions.

So for some two hundred years before AD 597, when Augustine was sent to Britain by Pope Gregory, a form of “Celtic” Christianity was already to be found in parts of Britain. This had developed within the existing native culture in which water and water divinities were important parts of the belief system.  The Saxons, Jutes and Angles who had settled in Britain and whose kingdoms Augustine was sent to convert, had their own traditions and a highly developed culture linked to veneration of nature based gods. Water and Holy Well worship would not have been a strange idea to the Anglo-Saxons.

During his mission, Augustine made two unsuccessful attempts to influence the Celtic churches of Western Britain. Although the leaders of these congregations remained in contact with Rome, the Celtic churches seem to have favoured the teachings and practices they shared with the Eastern Orthodox Church. There was a schism between Rome and the Orthodox churches based at Constantinople about matters such as calculations for fixing the date of Easter and also the exercise of authority. The Celtic churches found the Orthodox position more to their liking especially the way of fixing the date for Easter and the monastic idea that local authority came from an elected abbott rather than from a bishop appointed from Rome.

Augustine seems to have felt that the Celtic churches were making little effort to convert the Anglo-Saxons and this may have been due to the efforts of the Anglo-Saxons kings to take over Celtic lands and authority. Strangely it was in fact the Celtic churches from their base on Iona which later converted the Northumbrian king Oswald and through him brought Christianity to other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms including Wessex. By AD 644 the Celtic Churches had widespread influence.

However at the Synod of Whitby held in that year, during a debate about whether Rome had greater authority than the Celtic Church based on Iona, Oswald’s successor King Oswiu, sided with the representative from Rome. Although the Celtic Church lost its preminence and some of its leaders adopted the Roman customs, the significance influence of the Celtic form of Christianity did continue for several hundred years after Whitby.

Before and after Whitby, missionaries from the Celtic churches of Ireland and Wales journed throughout Europe as part of a great perigrinatio- travel for Christ. Their routes lay along the seaways around Devon and Cornwall and across the countryside at favoured landfalls. It is to these Saints that we owe the foundation of many churches in what was then the Kingdom of Dumonia and later became Cornwall and Devon. They came from a Celtic tradition in to a Celtic area with its attachment to the sacred properties of water; (the Celtic church also favoured the Gospel of John in which water plays such an important part including the story of the well at Bethesda which had healing properties when disturbed by an angel). Many of these Saints established themselves close to a well or spring and this led to the naming of the site after the Saint  – even when such a name may have been given long after the death of the person so remembered.

The Anglo- Saxons reached Exeter before the end of the 7^th century. Their annexation of Devon seems to have been effective and for example only about 1% of place names in the County can be now be traced as having Celtic roots. However the Celtic influence remained more secure in west and north of the county and it was almost two hundred years before Athlestan drove the Cornish back to the river Tamar which he then fixed as the boundary.