The Well at the World’s Edge: Hazel, Salmon and the Source of Wisdom

At the source of the river Boyne, the Dindshenchas says, there was a well called Segais, and over it grew nine hazels of wisdom. Their nuts fell into the water and the salmon that lived there ate them and grew wise, and the bubbles of inspiration, the nós, rose from the nuts and floated downstream. Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers might approach the well. His wife Boánn, proud or curious or both, walked around it three times against the sun, and the well rose up and pursued her to the sea, tearing off a thigh, a hand and an eye as it went, and the river that is the Boyne is her body and the well’s water together. Newgrange stands on its bank, and the Salmon of Knowledge swam in its pool until Fionn burned his thumb on it.

The Well as Door

Ireland has, by various counts, around three thousand holy wells. Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Man have hundreds more. Nearly every one has a saint, a day, a cure and a round. Nearly every one was something before the saint arrived. Archaeology finds offerings in springs and lakes from the Bronze Age onward: swords, cauldrons, gold, the carved wooden figures of Source-de-la-Seine, the Llyn Cerrig Bach hoard on Anglesey. The Celts put their most precious things into water, because water was where the Otherworld came closest to the surface.

In the shamanic map the well is a classic entrance to the Lower World: a hole in the earth that goes down into darkness and water. In the Celtic map it is more than that. It is the eye of the land, the place where the inside of the hill looks out. It is where Boánn met her transformation and where Fionn met his. In the Welsh tale of Lludd and Llefelys the dragons are found by digging at the exact centre of the island, where there is a pool. The well is where the Celtic Otherworld, which is usually beside us, is for once directly beneath, and so it is the one place where the two cosmologies, the vertical and the horizontal, agree.

The Hazel and the Salmon

The hazel, coll, is the tree of wisdom in Irish tradition and its letter in Ogham. Its nuts were a staple food of Mesolithic Ireland eight thousand years before the Celts, and the memory of the hazel as the giver of sustenance and of knowledge may be older than any Celtic language. The salmon, bradán, is the one creature that lives in the sea and the river both, that goes out into the western ocean and comes back to the exact pool of its birth, that leaps the falls. It is the traveller between realms, and it is wise because it has eaten what fell from the tree at the source.

Put the three together and you have a complete shamanic cosmology in one image: the tree that joins the worlds, the water that opens into them, and the animal ally who travels between them and carries knowledge back. Fionn, the boy who cooks the salmon for his teacher and burns his thumb and puts it in his mouth, is every practitioner who tends the fire for someone else and finds that the knowledge has come to them anyway. Afterwards, whenever he needed to know a thing, Fionn had only to put his thumb in his mouth and chew. This is teinm laída, the chewing of the pith, and it was one of the three methods of the filidh. The salmon is in the practitioner now.

Approaching a Well

The customs of the holy well are the most continuous ritual practice in the Celtic lands, and they are a complete teaching in sacred site etiquette.

• Come on the day, if there is one, the pattern day of the saint, when the whole parish once came. Or come at dawn, or at the turn of the year.
• Walk the rounds. Circle the well sunwise, deiseal, the number of times the custom says, three or seven or nine, praying or holding your intention. Boánn walked against the sun; see what happened.
• Drink or wash if the water is clean and the custom allows. Many wells have a specific cure: eyes, warts, headache, the back. Bathe the part.
• Leave an offering that will rot or dissolve: a strip of natural cloth on the rag tree, a coin in the water where that is the custom, a flower, a word. Never plastic, never anything that will outlive the moment.
• Take nothing except water, where it is customary, and the knowledge you came for. Tying a cloth takes your ailment and leaves it to rot with the rag; taking the rag takes the ailment home.
• Sit. After the rounds, before you leave, sit by the water in silence and let it look at you. This is where the journey happens, if it is going to.
• Give thanks to the saint, and to whoever was there before the saint.

A Well Journey

Sit at a well you have visited in the body, or picture one you know. Set your intention: to go down through this water to the source, to meet the salmon, to ask for one thing. Let the drum begin. See the surface of the water. Go in. The water is darker than you expect and warmer. Go down. You will come to the place where the river begins, and there will be a tree, and there will be something in the water that knows you. Ask your question. Accept the answer in whatever form it comes: a nut, a bubble, a word, a bite on the thumb. Thank the one who gave it. Come up the way you went down. Break the surface. Open your eyes. Put your thumb in your mouth, if it helps, and write.

The well at the world’s edge is also the well at the edge of your own townland. Find the one nearest you. Learn its name, its saint, its day. Go on the day. The Boyne begins in a small, unremarkable pool in a field in Kildare, and all the wisdom of Ireland floated down from it on the bubbles of a hazelnut.