As we cross a shallow ford, the water seems more like a southern chalk stream than a Northumberland burn. Pebbles gleam through gin-like clarity. Monkey flowers trace the fast-flowing channel as we walk up through the dry field. Ahead on a slight rise is a copse set within a stone wall topped by a wooden paling fence. There’s a tinkling of massed goldfinches, wingbeats of song thrushes, pigeons crooning in the heat. The place seems full of birds, drawn by the ring of seven beech trees and the clear waters of Lady’s Well.
Within the cool enclosure is a spring-fed reservoir, apsidal in shape, reflecting sky and trees in its calm surface. This basin around the ancient spring may have been created by the Romans; it lies closely parallel to the Roman road that ran from Bremenium in Redesdale to the coast. The Celtic-style cross standing at the pool’s centre was added in Victorian times; carved words on its plinth, blurred by vivid orange lichens, tell of St Paulinus supposedly baptising 3,000 people at this spot in AD627.
The place became known as Lady’s Well after a nearby 12th-century nunnery; demolished during the Reformation, its remains were found recently in a community dig. A medieval statue of St Paulinus, robes falling in sensuous wavy pleats, was brought from Alnwick Castle in 1780. It stands on the bank looking at the cross and, beyond that, to an octagonal stone altar. Someone has left a small crucifix on the altar and circled it with coins like a map of the solar system.
Oak and beech leaves have settled on the gravel at the bottom of the pool, their every vein visible through two feet of water. Filtered through fine sand, the source issues from the well to run through village gardens – it once powered a cornmill. Its steady flow never varies and I’m told that the closest match for its mineral composition is found in Bergen, Norway.
We stand silently, looking across the pool and out to the hills, where the heather is turning purple. Sheep call from the surrounding pastures. There’s a sense of centuries in this quiet place in the hills.
