Skip to main content

Well, Well, Well!

One of the joys of moving to a new area is the discovery of local traditions, often unknown outside of their small area.  England is rife with such customs, ranging from the riotous  (Padstow 'Obby 'Oss - a Cornish village May Day parade) to the ridiculous (Gloucestershire cheese rolling - chasing a Double Gloucester cheese down a 1 in 3 hill).  Both of these have become internationally famous, but few people we know outside of Derbyshire seem to have heard of the local practice of well dressing.

That's not the same as being well-dressed, you understand.  In fact wearing your best clothes to help dress a well would be a really bad idea.  The process starts with trampling clay underfoot, softening it to fill a wooden frame.  Then you have to trek through the woods to find flower petals, leaves, twigs and alder cones to build up the picture.  Only natural materials are allowed, although not necessarily British - we noticed coffee beans and glacé cherries included in some patterns!


The designs are beautiful, and amazingly detailed; it can take up to three days to create the well dressings.  Once finished, they are displayed at water sources around the village for a week or so.



We visited the tiny village of Tissington, which claims to have originated the custom.  It's a beautiful place to wander around on any sunny day, so the open-air artwork was just the icing on the cake.  Many of this year's dressings commemorated the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  The sombre depiction of a battlefield was particularly moving. 





Lightening the mood, the Faith, Hope + Community picture featured farm animals, teapots and sugar cubes.  And some strange things that looked vaguely like moneybags.  Any guesses?




Altogether there were seven well dressings spread around the village.  We admired them all, shared a picnic lunch, and walked a small portion of the nearby Tissington Trail.  My mom taught Toby a few flower names, and on the way home he fell asleep in the car.  Still clutching a sprig of wild garlic.


All's well that ends well!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trent Valley: the march of the pylons

In the 1980s, the River Trent supplied the cooling water for fifteen coal-fired power stations, each one gobbling up coal from the local mines and quenching its heat with gallons of river water. The area was known as Megawatt Valley . As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the mines closed, the coal trains stopped running, and the iconic cooling towers, one by one, fell to the ground. The high-voltage electricity lines which connected the stations to the grid are still there, however, and they dominated the walk I did today. The stately silhouettes of pylons stalked across the landscape, carrying fizzing power lines which sliced up the sky. At one point, I was within view of two of the remaining sets of cooling towers. Diving further back into history, I parked by Swarkestone Lock on the Trent & Mersey Canal, walked past St James' Church, and arrived at Swarkestone Bridge, a 14th-century causeway which still, remarkably, carries traffic today. It was famously the southernmos...

Trent Valley: Twyford, both ways

To complete my loop along the Dove Valley  from the mouth at Newton Solney up to Dovedale at Thorpe, across to Matlock on the Limestone Way , and back south along the Derwent Valley , I needed to walk one last section along the River Trent from Derwent Mouth to Repton. Originally I planned to do it in that direction. But for various reasons I ended up doing it the other way. The walk from Repton to Ingleby was completed weeks ago, at the beginning of June, and, for the sake of completeness, I also, later, walked from Findern to Twyford, on the other bank of the river. If I had done the walk sixty years or more ago, I could have crossed the river by ford or ferry at Twyford, and that would have been my most direct route home. the Trent at Twyford Walk 1: Repton to Ingleby Starting from the centre of Repton, I made my way out of the village and crossed the fields to Milton. Wystan Arboretum Milton The Trent Rivers Trust has been busy establishing the Trent Valley Way . This sect...

The Churnet Way: a wonderful walk

The loop from Oakamoor to Froghall and back was one of the most enjoyable walks I've done in a long time. It had a bit of everything: woods, ponds, rivers and railways; steep climbs and sweeping views; an unusual church, an ex-industrial wharf, and, as a final bonus, car parks with toilets. Of course, the sunny weather helped too. I parked in Oakamoor and set off along a quiet lane called Stoney Dale. This is the route of the Churnet Way, which deviates away from the river for a couple of miles. After a while I turned right and climbed up through the woods on a gravelly path, then dropped down to the B5417. a spring in Oakamoor   Crossing the road, I entered Hawksmoor Nature Reserve. It has some fine gateposts commemorating John Richard Beech Masefield, "a great naturalist". I found a photo of the opening of the gateway in 1933; unsurprisingly, the trees have grown a lot since then! A track took me down through the woods to East Wall Farm. Lovely view! Nice duck pond as ...