At the end of a steep woodland trail, surrounded by sturdy beech and ash trees, a freshwater spring bubbles into a basic stone well, rippling in the low winter sunlight.
On nearby branches and around the mouth of the well colourful cloth rags – or cloots – have been hung by visitors, as an offering to a water spirit or local saint and an entreaty to be healed.
The clootie well near Munlochy, a village on the Black Isle peninsula across the Beauly Firth from Inverness, is a place of traditional pilgrimage and modern curiosity. It is also now a cause of community consternation, after a well-meaning stranger cleared away many of the offerings.
“I’m sure the person who cleared up thought they were doing something good,” says Claire Mackay, a herbalist who lives on the Black Isle, “but the fact they took it upon themselves, weren’t a local and did it without the permission of Forestry and Land Scotland [which manages the site] has upset a lot of people.”
Some neighbours have fulminated on the community Facebook page – even suggesting the individual may henceforth be cursed for “desecrating” the sacred site – while others acknowledge the site was already in need of attention before the offerings were swiped last weekend.
The well had gathered an accumulation of eccentric offerings during lockdown, including bras, pants and a hi-vis jacket. The damage wrought by Storm Arwen in late November also blew down many of the cloot-covered branches.
Verity Walker, a local author and heritage consultant, can remember the “clootie trees” being trimmed or cleared when she passed the well as a child. It is an ancient tradition that now coexists alongside modern faiths, she says. “When my daughter injured her foot, I hung a sock – it has to be biodegradable and related to the part of the body that you want to recover.”
Mackay is optimistic that the initial outrage can be channelled into a more organised approach to maintaining the site. “The clean-up should have been a community decision,” she says. “But now we can treat it as a clean slate and hope it has planted that seed about the need for people to leave more natural things.”
Paul Hibberd, a regional visitor services manager for Forestry and Land Scotland, points out that there is already signage asking people to leave “only small, biodegradable offerings” at the well. Local rangers visit regularly to tidy and “remove the most inappropriate items”, he adds, but staff are aware this is a site that “people feel a very strong connection with”.
The build-up of debris “also highlights how much plastic is in modern clothes”, Hibberd adds. “That’s part of the problem with items not breaking down.”
Clootie wells, which are also found in Cornwall and Ireland, date far back into pre-Christian times and the practice of leaving votives and offerings for spirits in wells and springs. The healing well at Munlochy has been linked to Saint Boniface, who worked as a missionary in Scotland around AD620, and is probably an example of early Christianity absorbing more ancient Celtic traditions.
Pilgrims performed a ceremony that involved circling the well three times before splashing some of its water on the ground and saying a prayer. They would then tie a piece of cloth that had been in contact with the ill person to a nearby tree and, as the rag rotted away, so that person would be healed.
There are plans for a community group to care for the area on a regular basis, with more than a hundred local people already expressing an interest. Mackay has plans for storytelling at the well and input from local historians, as well as outreach into schools to explain to children how to leave votives and cloots without harming the environment.
“It’s a symbolic act,” says Walker, “an act of meditation and connection, an act of faith even if you’re not sure what you have faith in, and that’s only to be encouraged.”
