I didn’t attend last weekend’s WellFest at Dublin’s Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK), or not officially anyway. I did, however, enter the spirit of the occasion, and soon afterwards exited it, because the route is part of my regular Saturday morning run.
In the minute or two it took to pass through the RHK, I was struck by what seemed to be the overwhelmingly female attendance at an event billed as “Europe’s largest health, fitness and wellness festival”.
Also obvious was the surprising level of noise and excitement that can be generated by mass-participation yoga, pilates and squat jumps. It sounded like a football match, although I don’t think anyone was keeping score.
Exiting the gate at Bully’s Acre, the ancient cemetery at the RHK’s western end, I then found myself wondering about the different meanings of the word “well”.
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There’s the adverb, of course, as in “I’m well”: now falling out of fashion thanks to the (adjectivally abusive) Americanism “I’m good”. There’s also the related Irish form of address: an implied question about your health, even when the word is used alone.
That remains especially popular in my native Monaghan, from where family members still sometimes send me texts that begin: “Well Frankie.”
And then there’s the noun, for the kind of well with water in it. Both noun and adverb have roots in old German but were entirely separate words once, before the spellings merged. Now sometimes, the meanings merge too, as they seemed to be doing in Kilmainham.
After all, the watery kind of well can also be a source of wellbeing, so long as it isn’t poisoned. And this is all the truer, by tradition, if it’s a holy well. Which was the case, famously for many centuries, with St John’s Well, located near the same Bully’s Acre.
That was long the site of an annual pilgrimage in midsummer, where the faithful came in search of healing. Like many such pilgrimages, it also became the scene of much carousing, which may have offset some of the health benefits.
The aristocratic French traveller Jacques-Louis de Bougrenet de la Tocnaye, who toured Ireland in the 1790s while escaping the revolution at home, left a vivid description of such a holy well, around which pilgrims walked barefoot, touching stones and drinking the water, or pouring it on afflicted body parts.
True to national stereotype, he eyed one “very pretty young girl” as she kissed a stone for her health and “could not help thinking that I would have been a much better restorer if she had paid the reverence to me”.
But the pilgrimage was not all about piety even for the locals, De la Tocnaye confirmed. Asked why he came, one young man confessed: “to do what the others do and see the women.” Many marriages ensued, the Frenchman heard.
He concluded: “It is in vain that the priest of the parish has often forbidden his people to go to such places; they have followed this custom so long before the establishment of Christianity that they cannot be broken off it.”
They were broken off it in Kilmainham, eventually. When the great cholera epidemic of 1832 swelled the underground population of Bully’s Acre, the authorities closed the annual revelries down. Then they ran a railway through it – the Great Southern and Western – to be on the safe side.
The well’s former stone surrounds now stand in a garden of St James’s Catholic Church, near Guinness’s. The well itself must still be flowing somewhere under the train line into Heuston.
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If the WellFest is maintaining the healing tradition of St John’s pilgrimage, the summer music festivals now held in the same venue may be emulating some of its former excesses.
Mind you, I saw Iggy Pop perform there last June and he wouldn’t have been out of a place as a medieval pilgrim. Scoliosis has left him with one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other.
But despite this, and him being 78, he cavorted around the stage like a man miraculously cured, stripping to the waist as usual (as did some of his fans), even though the temperatures fell to low single figures. It must indeed be something in the water.
Speaking of which, the RHK meadow, where festivals now take place, is notoriously prone to flooding. As unholy water fell on it daily last January and February, I watched the giant puddle there grow alarmingly, until the first “deep water” warning signs were submerged and the venue had to put new ones on higher ground.
Long after the rain finally stopped, the deluge remained. Running through the RHK in March and April, I found myself trying (and failing) to rewrite a classic ballad, sung by Paul Brady and others, as The Lakes of Last Month’s Rain.
Now finally, the water has all evaporated, just in time for festival season. Nearby and unseen, meanwhile, the holy well gurgles on.
