Dupath Well House, Callington

Somewhat off the beaten pilgrimage path, Callington boasts a near perfectly preserved stone wellhouse, clearly designed for devout visitors to perform bathing rituals

‍Highlights

• Intact 16th-century wellhouse

On an architectural level, this granite wellhouse is in near-perfect condition. The well chamber itself, however, is silted up and the water is too shallow for dipping anything other than a hand. It is also in quite a public location, next to a busy farm.

Monks from the nearby St Germans built the wellhouse in 1510, so it only saw a short period of use before the Reformation. It fell to ruin but was restored in the 19th century.

The building is clearly designed for immersion, its walls providing privacy for the bath-sized holy pool. It is more or less aligned to the east, like a church. Some guides speculate that the building doubled as a chapel for visiting pilgrims.

The Water of Life assumes there was a shrine altar in the building, under which the holy water flowed. This seems logical on one level, although there is very little space between the bathing pool and east wall. The priest would have had to stand on a platform over this trough-like bath in order to celebrate Mass. I haven’t seen any other place in Britain where a bathing pool and altar are adjacent. They are used for such different rituals, with a very different state of dress for one thing.

The water flows out of the east wall of the building and gathers in a stone basin outside. As at St Clether’s Well, this water would have been blessed by contact with the saint’s relics, assuming there was a shrine altar here. Perhaps there was a reliquary in the wellhouse, rather than an altar.

There might have been a second chapel nearby that was used instead as a place of worship. The information panel on site talks of a lost chapel dedicated in 1405 to “St Ethelred”, perhaps St Ailred of Rievaulx. The English Heritage website, however, claims that this is one and the same as the Dupath Well Chapel, although other historians claim that Dupath’s well is dedicated to St Dominick or Dominica.

A sign inside the building says there was another chapel in the area dedicated to St Ildractus. The obvious candidate is therefore the Irish missionary St Dominica, who travelled to Britain with her brother St Indract in the 7th century. St Indract and perhaps St Dominica were martyred in around 700 at Huish Episcopi in Somerset.

St Indract’s shrine was later mentioned at Glastonbury, and there is a village two miles east of Dupath called St Dominick. If this St Dominica is patron of the wellhouse, it implies that the well has been considered holy since Saxon times.

On that note, the sign repeats a late medieval legend of a duel between a local landowner Gotlieb and a knight Sir Colan over a young lady, set in the Saxon era. Several versions of this legend survive, some of which suggest that the victor built the wellhouse in penance for killing his rival.

Next to: Dupath Farm, Callington PL17 8AD

www.cornwallheritagetrust.org

W3W: seriously.pads.garlic

GPS: 50.5002N 4.2927W

Directions:

The well is signposted from the A388 main road as you drive north into Callington. Park outside Dupath Farm and walk straight ahead along the track between the barns and the farmhouse. The well is on your right 100m from the farm entrance.