15 May: Well, Well

AVEBURYCHALICE WELL GLASTONBURY ABBEY

Only one more week – hard to believe. In some ways, it seems like I just got here; in others, the time has flown. I think about what it would have been like if I had come to live here as I’d planned after college. All this would be mine, incorporated into my being, part and parcel of daily life without the power to smite me into bliss. Each day I’ve stopped at least once, trembling and on the verge of tears, because where I am and what I’m seeing is so beautiful and so full of meaning for me.

For instance – Avebury today. I got out there without getting lost for a miracle (I do regret not stopping and getting a snapshot of an inexplicable obelisk plunked down in a cowfield on the eastern horizon. “What this pasture needs is an…. obelisk.” (Later, my Chalk Figures of Wessex guidebook informs me that this was the Lansdowne Obelisk.) I arrived at Avebury around ten – there was virtually no one around. I walked out to the stone ring and patted the maidens one by one as I made the circle… and the only living souls in sight were the rooks kvetching in the trees. It was intense – stones that have set there for 5000 years, a neolithic site older and larger than Stonehenge, and I could put my hand on them all alone.

Walked to the barn museum, where I got in just ahead of four pensioners. Very nice interactive displays on stone and iron age culture, how and why people did things, to the best of our knowledge. One of the displays was what they call “feelie boxes” – you put your hand in and feel wildcat fur or antler bone… But one wasn’t a feel, your hand activated a wolf’s howl, which startled us all quite a lot. When I had gone farther in, I could hear the pensioners behind me giggling and setting the wolf howl off again and again.

And then when I came out, there was an ice cream truck with mobile soft serve in the parking lot! I tell you, what a country. I got a cone and sat down to relish it. A rook came by, making eye contact with me like a dog begging at the dinner table. I threw it a crumb of the cone. It hopped over and ate it, then turned its trustful stare on me again. Throw cone bit, hop, it’s gone.

The day had turned glorious, sunny and warm – sunny enough that I used my sunglasses for the first time. I turned Kiwi (that’s what I call the car, since her license plate starts KWI) down to Glastonbury, which was an easy drive down well-marked roads. (Who is Canard, and why does his Grave merit two pubs?) I was prepared to be a bit ironical about Glastonbury, which I’ve been warned is a New-Agey, woo-woo sort of place. I was marvelously surprised and delighted by the spirit of the place – yes, there were lots of hippie teenagers hanging out on doorstops and crystal shops, but that didn’t affect the essential grandeur of the legendary Isle of Avalon. I didn’t do Glastonbury Tor – one feat of climbing per trip is the rule, and I’m saving myself for the Uffington White Horse. I parked in Well Lane and went into Chalice Well Garden, an extraordinary place.

The spring that forms Chalice Well has never run dry in all of recorded history. The water (iron-bearing, staining the channels red – it was called a blood spring in ancient times) comes from the depths of the earth and has never been part of the cycle of rain, stream, cloud and mist. It’s reputed to have curative powers – I am by no means the only gimp in the garden. You can drink from the spring itself, and they sell bottles if you haven’t brought one yourself to take water home – they even have an overflow pipe in the lane outside the garden, so anyone can get the healing water, not just people who have paid admission to the garden.

It’s a marvelous place, in layers and terraces, with lots of small corners for contemplation. The bottom pool is broad and flat, sparkling in the sunshine and shaped by the Vescia Pisci, the design of the well’s cover, an esoteric symbol of balance and the unity of dualities. Walking up (and for a healing spot, remarkably deficient in handrails), you reach a little waterfall under a yew in what they call King Arthur’s Court, and a little farther below, the Pilgrim’s Bath. I sat beside the waterfall for a bit, long enough to notice the ribbons pilgrims have hung in the lower branches of the yew, then headed uphill to the Lion’s Head, the spot for drinking and filling bottles. The way my body responded to the energy of the place was that my legs, which had been behaving nobly throughout this vacation, went entirely googley. The garden is very well designed for its function – there are small places to sit and wait outside each of the major stops on the circuit, so I was able to take a seat in a little summerhouse and take my shoes off while watching a sensible British couple fill four soda bottles and gulp up a few tumblers. I moved in once they departed – I bathed my feet in the basin, slick with rust deposits like a red algae and took a tumbler of water. Alas, no one respected my privacy as I respected theirs – several people came in and took a drink while I filled my bottles and sipped my glass. I went back to the summerhouse and waited for my feet to dry before putting my shoes back on (I watched several people bathing feet or legs, including a little Russian girl chaperoned by a formidable trio of matrons) and heading up to the well source itself. It’s a round shaft of stone going straight down however far, covered with green things, with the oak cover hospitably open. I wanted to give something to the spirit of the water, but I had nothing with me… or did I? What I had was a little pebble from Avebury in my jacket pocket – what is mine is yours, everything I have is on loan. I dropped the pebble into the well with deep gratitude.

Farther up the garden slope (the garden is charming, but much in need of the care of the young gardeners you see dibbling all around) was a holy thorn tree with a wicker woman tied to its branches. People have affixed tiny offerings to her – ribbons and earrings and crystals and plastic dinosaurs.

Relaxed and happy, I drove into the center of town. I browsed through some crystal shops, eventually scoring a very cool deck of Persian-inspired tarot. By then, I was ready for tea at a little tearoom across from the Abbey. At the next table was a charming but disobedient spaniel named Rosie, who was mesmerized by something dropped on the carpet that she can’t reach. Her apologetic father said she usually isn’t so crass.

The Abbey is lovely in its fragments – jupiter’s beard growing on the tops of the ruins, very cool. This is where Arthur and Guinevere were supposedly buried – the Abbey museum takes no sides, but points out that the Abbey had just burned down and needed patrons for rebuilding just at the moment when the monks excavated the “graves.”

I find I am remiss in my tally of PG Wodehouse village names: Ripe, Doulting, Limpely Stoke, Nunney Catch, Compton Pauncefoot, Hooe, Knook, Lower Zeal.

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