Shorn of ostentation, it was altogether a more meaningful meeting. Undoubtedly, Ffynnon y Garreg, on the outskirts of Llanfynydd was once a well of some renown - on visiting, it’s hard to venture an opinion otherwise, though now the well chamber that once contained the freely flowing spring has long been dismantled and removed.
Bubbling up from within the little copse at the base of two hawthorn trees, Ffynnon y Garreg feels...old.
The Royal Commission visited in October 1910, and described a well encircled on three sides by stones, many of them displaced and cast about, while noting one stone standing in front of the spring. The overflow from the well had rendered the field before it into something of a bog. One hundred and fourteen years later, almost to the day, I visited Ffynnon y Garreg, and while most of the stone had been removed, the spring was bubbling freely and thrillingly powerful from the ground, and the grass before the well had been flattened by the run off, through to the Ffordd Las - the ground as boggy as it had been in 1910.
As far as can be said, there are no known traditions of healing here, no saintly attribution. But it was known. With the stone well chamber largely gone, its siting in a small natural enclosure before a pair of hawthorn trees gives it a distinctly ancient, pre-Christian feel. It has lost the Augustine, ‘Christian solemnity’ sometimes imposed on these ancient places as the new religion’s missionaries arrived in these Islands and has returned to a more distant time.
After the heavy October rains, the spring was strong - the ground before it boggy, the grass to Ffordd Las flattened and sodden.
Francis Jones, writing in 1954 speculated on those wells called Ffynnon y Garreg, musing on the possibility that they reflected a relationship between the spring and a nearby standing stone. There is no tradition here of a nearby menhir, though of course the possibility that there had once been a standing stone here cannot be discounted entirely. The Royal Commission felt the name was rather more likely as a result of the far less substantial stone they witnessed in front of the spring - or even reflecting the ‘rocky surface of the adjacent lane’. I’d rather the former to the less impressive latter, for sure, and feel it more likely, in any case. Whether the stone by the impressive spring was the original spoken of by the Royal Commission, possibly the one which gave the spring its name cannot be said with any satisfaction, and in truth seems unlikely.
There are wells in Wales bearing the names of saints, wells bearing the names of churches and chapels. There are springs reflecting a tradition of cures and healing, even the names of notable local personages. Ffynnon y Garreg is none of these, at least at first glance. But to stand before it, as I did, and listen to the spring bubbling up from the soil and the wind within the trees, to watch the low autumn sun slowly set, casting shimmering light through the hawthorns, is to be in no doubt, that I was within the spiritual.
Further Reading
F. Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales, Cardiff, (1954)
RCAHMC, An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire, Flint, London, (1912)
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