St Pandionia & St John the Baptist Church, St Neots

Although off the main pilgrim trails, the community has conducted a pilgrimage at Pentecost in recent years, visiting this and other churches in the area

Highlights

• Former well and shrine of St. Pandonia

A locked church and a destroyed holy well were all that a pilgrimage to St. Pandonia’s shrine offered when I visited on an autumn weekday. It felt a strangely appropriate way to remember one of the most obscure English saints, whose holy body was once buried in this church. Veneration at her shrine and well was vigorously suppressed at the Reformation, blocking her off from a village she called home.

St. Pandonia was a nun who lived and died in a convent at Eltisley sometime in the early 10th century. The convent was probably 1 mile north of the village in the region of Papley, and was closed after the Norman Conquest. She was initially buried by a holy well, but her relics were moved into Eltisley’s church in 1344.

There are several water features beyond the southeastern churchyard boundary, inaccessible in the grounds of a private house where the vicarage once stood. These ponds mark the approximate location of the former holy well. The vicar who served here in 1575, Robert Palmer, would be delighted with the current state of affairs, since he filled in the well to prevent people from using it. The Living Stream says this is the first recorded destruction of a well after the Reformation.

A year after blocking up the well, Rev. Palmer was charged with using his vicarage as an alehouse and missing church services to play card games. Perfectly normal behavior nowadays, of course, but at the time these were serious ecclesiastical offenses. Most modern commentators conclude that Rev. Palmer was motivated to destroy the well by his general impiety. It seems equally possible that some of his aggrieved congregation resented the closure of their holy well and got their own back by exaggerating minor incidents.

The church has been dedicated to St. Pandonia since at least 1230 and received its joint dedication to St. John the Baptist sometime later. We have few facts of the saint’s life, nearly all of them recorded by John Leland in the early 16th century. She was the daughter of a Scottish or Irish king who fled south in order to preserve her virginity. The abbess of Eltisley was a relative of hers, and she lived and died as a nun here.

Though closed on my visit, the church is usually open to visitors during the day. There is nothing inside to mark the former site of her shrine. The oldest part of the current structure dates from around 1200. For an image of the saint, look no further than the village sign by the main road, 300m east of the church near the Eltisley pub, which depicts her as a nun holding a cross outside the parish church. The other side shows a cricket match, should you approach it from the opposite direction.‍

St. Pandionia & St. John the Baptist Church, The Green, Eltisley PE19 6TQ‍

www.papworthteamchurches.org‍

www.eltisleyvillage.co.uk/church‍

W3W: sniff.makeup.remix

GPS: 52.2205N 0.1446W

The church is on the west side of the village, locked when I visited but usually open.