St Walstan's Well and Church, Bawburgh

A St. Walstan’s Day pilgrimage in late spring pays homage to this rustic saint

Highlights

• Holy well of St. Walstan
• Former shrine of St. Walstan
• Saxon church

Every saint has a unique facet, hence the concept of patron saints. St. Walstan’s humble virtues are loved by the farmers and herdsmen of East Anglia and beyond. He was one of them, a laborer who became a folk hero in life and a saint after death. His story is a charming blend of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty.The church and holy well in his hometown of Bawburgh are still a peaceful place to remember him, as they have been for the past 1,000 years. His church is on the leafy edge of the village, and his restored well a short walk downhill. We lack contemporary records of St. Walstan, but his fame was widely established in the Middle Ages. Certainly, the church you can see today has fabric dating back to the correct period for the saint. The round tower’s walls are thick enough to indicate late Saxon construction. It is dedicated to St. Mary and St. Walstan, and its local saint is remembered inside by a charming wooden statue and an icon at the front of the nave.

The grave of St. Walstan used to be housed in a side chapel on the north side of the church. A blocked-up archway is visible in the north wall at the front of the nave, where his wooden statue now stands. The side chapel itself has been demolished, but you can stand on the grass outside the church where his shrine once stood. There is no trace of the saint’s body here now. His bones were burned and scattered at the Reformation.

Other reminders of the saint’s veneration inside the church include an ancient collection box that perhaps took offerings from pilgrims, turned from a single piece of wood. This is a rarity among church treasures. It was not only the shrine that suffered from the reformers’ zeal. The entire church building was abandoned and left to fall into ruin for a few decades. Fortunately, restoration came quickly enough to save the structure, and the church resumed as an active place of worship in 1637, only 100 years after the Reformation.

The holy well has been restored more recently and is set in a tidily mown lawn five minutes’ walk from the church. The modern wellhouse with its metal grille has been thoughtfully constructed to protect the site, though it makes access to the actual water slightly tricky. On my visit, the chamber had been filled with apples that were starting to rot. I had to lie flat on the ground to fish them all out, just reaching them through the grille with the tips of my fingers. The well is on the edge of an orchard, the church in view uphill.

It is likely that veneration at this well continued after the Reformation, and even during Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth. By the 19th century, a more Catholic sensibility held sway, and pilgrimage restarted in earnest. Nowadays worshippers walk down from the church to his holy well on the Sunday nearest his saint’s day, 30 May. On the millennium anniversary of his death in 2016, a pilgrimage was held from Marlingford, 3 miles away.

The main record for St. Walstan’s life is a 15th-century hagiography, a late work that no doubt embroiders some of its folklore elements. He is given, for example, an aristocratic birth which he rejects in favor of life as a farmhand. Perhaps he was just a farmhand: of all saints, St. Walstan needs no pedigree.

Embellished or not, the story says that St. Walstan turned his back on wealth and comfort at only 12 years old. Leaving his home in Bawburgh, he found employment as a farm laborer at Taverham, 7 miles to the north. He gave away most of his clothes and possessions and worked barefoot among nettles and brambles. The farmer’s wife came to reprimand him for such reckless generosity, but stopped when she realized that the deprivation meant nothing to him. Spiritual energy protected his bare feet from the thorns and prickles.

St. Walstan died in 1016 in a field, while saying his prayers for the sick and for cattle. Before he passed away, he instructed that his funeral bier should be carried by two of his faithful oxen. Where they stopped would be the place for his grave. The Bishop of Elmham agreed to conduct the funeral, so well-loved had St. Walstan been in his lifetime. Some historians have conjectured that the oxen had been used to carry flint to Bawburgh, where St. Walstan was helping to construct the church. If so, they would have followed the route automatically and left their master at the building he cared for most.

In medieval times, the shrine and well were so popular that the church had to employ a small team of priests to cope with the constant stream of pilgrims from near and far. They prayed here for the sick and for their animals and drank at the well of a saint who would understand their plight. Today, even without a priest to give directions, and even when the water tastes vaguely of stale cider, it is still possible to receive this honest saint’s blessing.

Directions‍

St. Mary’s and St. Walstan’s Church, Church St, Bawburgh NR9 3LP‍

www.achurchnearyou.com/church/2629‍

W3W: yield.biggest.pegs GPS: 52.6335N 1.1803E well

W3W: pulps.rocky.zoos GPS: 52.6327N 1.1796E church

The church is at the end of Church Street to the west of the village. It is often locked, but a notice explains where to find a keyholder a few minutes’ walk away. For once, though, a locked church is no disaster, since you can visit the holy well and the site of Walstan’s shrine (outside the north wall of the building, by the last nave window before the buttress).

The holy well is a short walk downhill. From the cemetery gates, where you park, don’t enter the churchyard but walk along the drive above the church. This bends round the back of the church and leads downhill and then into a large yard. About 20m before this yard, there is a footpath on the left. St. Walstan’s Well is down there. Church leaflets provide a clear map of this route, which takes five minutes at most.