Wells, streams, and lakes among primitive peoples are usually regarded as infested by local nature-spirits, kind or cruel, to which offerings may be made. The savage invests everything with personality and life, and what is poetry to us is philosophy to him. The Ganges is still a sacred stream even to the civilised Hindu, and we need not be surprised to find the Xanthos or Scamander among the Homeric Greeks provided with its priest and appeased with sacrifices. Melusine (q.v.); the water-kelpie, for which it came out before the Crofters Commission in 1888 that a loch in the Gairloch district had been trawled and quicklined in vain not twenty-five years before; and the sea-serpent seen every now and then on our shores show the malignant side of this nature-superstition, just as its more beneficent aspects are seen in our healing-wells and wishing-wells, in the 'well-wakes' that lingered in corners of Shropshire into the 19th century, and the floral-offerings—'well-dressings' of Derbyshire (notably at Tissington), Staffordshire, Westmorland, and north Lancashire, to which Milton alludes in Comus. Christianity only substituted a saint's name for the indigenous nature-deity, and water-worship held its place—in Brittany, in Ireland, in St Chad's baptismal well at Lichfield, St Milburga's at Much Wenlock, and hundreds of other places. The worship of fountains is condemned in the canons of St Anselm (1102), but continued for centuries afterwards. In St Bede's well, near Jarrow, weakly children are dipped and crooked pins offered; at St Helen's well in Yorkshire pieces of cloth are offered; Fergan well near the Scotch Avon was good for skin diseases and running sores; St Dwynwen's well in Anglesea was good against love-sickness, St Cynhafal's in Denbighshire against warts; at Sefton in Lancashire there is a well into which maidens throw pins in order to divine the date of marriage and test the fidelity of their lovers. Ailing children were carried to St Anthony's well at Maybole on the first Sunday of May; the well at Trinity Gask in Perthshire was sought on the first Sunday of June. The well of St Keyne (q.v.) in Cornwall had peculiar properties of special interest to husbands and wives. The most famous of all in England is that at Holywell which sprang up of itself at the place within St Beuno's Church to which rolled the head of St Winifred when struck off by Caradog ab Alan. The flow of water has never since ceased, and in 1876 the well was leased to the corporation of Holywell by the Duke of Westminster for a thousand years at a sovereign a year. There is but one story against its virtue told by Lilly of Sir George Peckham, who died in the well in 1635, 'having continued so long numbling his pater nosters and "Sancta Winifreda, ora pro me," that the cold struck into his body, and after his coming forth of that well he never spoke more.' At St Tecla's well in Denbighshire a man could transfer his epilepsy to a cock after bathing in the well. Richard Baxter when a schoolboy heard a well at Oundle in Northamptonshire emit a noise like a drum about the time the Scots came into England, and was told the same well drummed again when Charles II. died. St Elian's in Denbighshire is the chief of the 'cursing-wells' of Wales, and it is possible to make an enemy pine by casting into it a pin and a pebble inscribed with his name.
See books by Brand, Henderson, Burne, Gregor, Wirt Sikes, Black, Hope (1893), and Mackinlay (1894).