Earthy Entanglements Part 1:
Spirituous Waters

Nicola Whyte 

Despite growing public knowledge and acceptance of human-made environmental and climate change the demand for plastic-packaged products, including water, remains undiminished. Bottled water offers expectations of purity and good health apparently drive demand above tap water, which is often perceived as having been tainted by chemicals used during the treatment process. Bottled in plastic, and transported from source to shop, the predilection for spring water comes at immense environmental and societal cost. Plastic bottles are made from crude oil, yet the extraction of oil is a major contributor to climate and environmental change (https://green.harvard.edu/tools-resources/green-tip/reasons-avoid-bottled-water). It is widely known that sources of drinking water are routinely polluted, due to flooding caused by climate change, leaving many communities, reliant on bottled water to prevent serious, life-threatening illnesses. In addition, disposable plastic bottles and other items - waste discarded by affluent societies - pollute oceans, rivers and estuaries with devastating impacts on ecologies of life (https://earth.org/what-is-the-great-garbage-patch/ ; https://theoceancleanup.com/sources/).

In Britain, and other regions of the global north, there is perhaps a sense of consumer entitlement in choosing water originating from beyond the reach of human-made pollutants and toxic contaminants. Yet, the idea that a pristine realm or wilderness exists that is at once unspoiled by human activities, yet also provides necessary resources to be packaged and sold, reveals a perplexing contradiction in modern cultural attitudes towards ‘nature’. It is one that must be addressed if we are to move beyond extractivist thinking and practises. Among capitalist and consumerist societies, the underground is viewed as an economic resource. Technological progress and ingenuity is required to discover and mine commodities, whether stone, metal, mineral or water. In devastating contrast, land and water ecologies in the global south have been made uncertain and insecure, if not uninhabitable, by the extractivist practises of wealthy nations.

In this brief contribution to the Earth Humanities conversation, I develop a historical understanding of the meanings and functions of mineral water, in Britain some three hundred years ago. Far removed from the sanitised packaged-up water many of us drink today, we find an alternative understanding of the potency of water originating deep underground. We discover evidence for spiritual enchantment and belief in the other-worldly potencies of water from the subterranean realm. History has much to offer in providing alternative understanding of ideas and practises that are not simply nor straightforwardly of our time. Historical research is vitally important for providing different perspectives on the ways people in the past understood the environment and, for our purposes here, the vertical relationship between above/below ground. In the past, people held a deep understanding of the dynamic interactions between between human and other-than-human processes. 

The health properties of spring water were known centuries ago, but in contrast (for many of us in today living in the global north), the subterranean realm was an imagined space of spiritual contemplation and reverence. Pilgrimage routes to holy springs and wells were well established in the medieval period, and across subsequent centuries, many sites continued to hold a place in the popular imagination, as locales of bodily and spiritual healing. Evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals the folly of attempting to transport mineral water in corked bottles, which it was believed would greatly reduce the efficacy of the water. It was thought expedient and necessary to imbibe the health benefits of mineral water at source. Water from the wells at Tunbridge, for example, was considered by one contemporary writer as  ‘spirituous’ and ‘ready to Evaporate if Carry'd any way’.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, people continued to be fascinated to discover the medicinal properties of spring water. Early geologists and natural historians, like Borlase (Cornwall), Morton (Northamptonshire) and Plot (Staffordshire), undertook extensive regional studies involving observation, scientific experimentation and first-hand experience of researching the other-than-human world. They pursued greater knowledge of earth, water and air, together with an understanding of various assemblages of flora and fauna found living in diverse locales. They recorded how different types of water had different qualities and effects on the body. Chalybeate water, containing iron salts, was well known for its healing properties. Borlase noted how he had known two people, which he considered sufficient proof, cured of the King’s-evil (scrofula) by drinking and washing in the water. He noted the necessary diuretic affects of chalybeate water on the body, and how it passes forcibly by perspiration, promotes evacuation and restores lost appetite. The water, he writes, also ‘cures sores and scrofulous eruptions, and is a very good collyrium [eyewash] for the eyes’. While contemporaries, recognised the benefits of drinking spring water, too much could have an undesired if not detrimental effect on the body. Morton, for example, noted how the waters of Watford, made men bald by the age of thirty. Elsewhere, the spring waters at Canterbury, were thought to numb the limbs if drunk in excess.

In The Natural History of Cornwall (published in 1758) Borlase recorded a number of springs and wells, including St Eunys Well, the site of which he identified from the ruins of a medieval pilgrims chapel. Long into the eighteenth century, the water provided a potent cure for a range of ailments, and was reputedly good for ‘drying humours’, healing wounds and sores. Having conducted a range of experiments, Borlase suspected that the mere coldness of the water was likely to produce such effects, for the water lacked mineral content. He went on to surmise, being ‘very gracious in Providence’, God ensured the coldness of the water, which braced up the nerves and muscles, strengthened the glands, promoted secretion and circulation: ‘the two great ministers of health’. The well was considered most potent in the month of May. While Borlase was visiting, he came across two women from the neighbouring parish, in his words: ’busily employed in bathing a child they both assured me, that people who had a mind to receive any benefit from St Euny’s Well, must come and wash upon the three first Wednesdays in May’. 

Unusual signs or behaviour exhibited by spring water could be taken as a providential sign. John Morton, writing on Northamtonpshire, discussed springs of ‘a Temporary kind’, considered to be of great significance by local people. One such spring known as ‘Marvel-dike’ in ‘Boughton Field about Two Bow Shoot from Brampton Bridge nigh Kingsthorp Road’ (this level of local detail is typical of the time). The spring was considered rare and remarkable and a portent of what was to come. In Morton’s words: ‘It never runs but in mighty Gluts of wet and whenever it does is thought ominous by the Country People, who from the Breaking out of that Spring, are wont to prognosticate Dearth, the Death of some Great Person, or very Troublesome Times’. We find in historical evidence from centuries ago, the intricate entanglements of human and non-human world-making. The Earth itself foretold the future : an interconnectedness we are re-learning in this current time of climate crisis and planetary precarity. 

For contemporary writers, it was not enough to simply drink mineral water, rather they reveal the importance of experiencing water by bathing in it. Writing in 1682, Celia Fiennes noted her visit to St Winifred’s Well, which was renowned for treating lameness, aches and distempers since the medieval period. Fiennes, a strong critic of the catholic past, when pilgrimage was an important aspect of religious practice, was generally disparaging towards the “poor, deluded papists” she encountered when visiting wells and springs. Yet, her journey was in its own way a pilgrimage, not in the medieval sense of communing with the saints for intercessions before God, but rather she sought evidence of an other-worldly presence, beyond the human. Through drinking and bathing in mineral water, she was able to feel the presence of her deity. Fiennes like many of her contemporaries, was interested in the interactions between the human body and the other-than-human world. Drinking from springs (known then as spaws) and wells was a means of realising this intimate, embodied relationship. She measured the strength and efficacy of water, writing down her tasting notes and importantly the intensity of the ‘purge’ set in motion by the water passing through her own body! 

Fiennes described her experience of bathing in St Mongers well in Cockgrave, as exceedingly cold owing to the clay through which the water percolated: the ‘Coldness of the spring just at the head of the spring, so …fresh which needs be very strengthening; it shuts up the pores of the body immediately, so fortifies from the cold’. Fiennes found it impossible to withstand the temperature for more than two or three minutes, before getting out again to move around on the pavement and then in again, ‘and so three or four or six or seven times as you please’. The benefits of cold water swimming on mind and body are of course well known today. As Fiennes observed, the coldness of the waters evidently led to a euphoric, presumably close to hyperthermic state. Visiting St Mongers well near Harrogate, she described the spring contained by a high wall, with four or five steps leading down to the bottom, ‘no deeper at some places then a little above the waist not up to the shoulders of a woman’. She described bathing in the ‘remarkably cold’ water and noted how some visitors would keep on their wet bathing garments ‘letting them dry to them’, they ‘say its more beneficial’ that way. 

In the descriptions provided by early writers we find a deep spirituality entangled with an ecological imaginary. Nature was thought to have been given to humankind by a benevolent God, but on the condition that balance and harmony be maintained through the love and care of all animate and inanimate elements. We find evidence of a common belief that flora found growing near holy wells and medicinal springs, soaked up the vital essence of that place. Fiennes records how the moss growing upon the red stones that signified St Winifred’s blood, spilled upon her cruel execution, was believed to be ‘full of great virtue for Everything’. Visitors carried away with them handfuls of moss, as a living mnemonic that, presumably if kept moist, could be planted when they reached home. According to Fiennes, such was the popularity of taking away moss growing around the well, it needed to be replenished daily from a nearby hill, in order to keep up with demand. 

Landscapes in Britain bear the markers of a long history of spiritual enchantment with the subterranean realm. Flowing through rock and soil, spring water carried essential minerals believed to hold remedial properties for mind and body. As such, other-worldly agents were thought to be suspended in liquid form that once imbibed would have a transformative effect on the corporal and spiritual body. Subterranean waters thus served a liminal function, transgressing boundaries by flowing from below to above ground, and through the veins and bowels of Earth into the body.

NICOLA WHYTE (History, Exeter)

For an extended version of this paper see my contribution to Religion and Heritage ed. Jay Johnston (forthcoming).