Hollinshead Hall Holy Well

Location: Tockholes, Lancashire

Hollinshead Hall today lies almost totally in ruins, a relic of a less equitable time. The one building that remains is the Well House, where water pours into two stone troughs out of the mouth of a stone lion. Why does this one building survive?

Well, you can't have a liminal place without a bit of mystery, can you?

The West Pennine Moors are a wild, and windswept, part of the Pennines near Manchester. Their natural beauty is possibly not as dramatic as the Yorkshire Dales to the north, and the Peak District to the south, although they are wild enough in places, but they make up for it with their human story, especially the mysteries.

Take Tockholes, for example, a small village near Blackburn. Something grisly happened here in the Civil War, but what exactly is a mystery. Less mysterious, and also less bloody, was the conflict over the construction of the M65 motorway through Stanworth valley. They lost, but nearby Darwen Tower commemorates a victory by an earlier generation of eco-warriors over access to the moor.

Then there is Hollinshead Hall.

The hall stands in woodland on the edge of the edge of the moors. The obvious reason for it being called 'Hollinshead Hall', would be that it was the home of Hollinshead family. However whilst the Hollinshead family did ev.entually end up living there, the hall was more than 400 years old by this stage, so the name clearly came form somewhere else.

One theory is that it is a corruption of 'holy head', derived from the Anglo-Saxon name for a spring-fed holy well. This is certainly what the locals call it today: Holy Well.

The hall itself has not been lived in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and has pretty much ceased to exist apart from its foundations, with the stone half-inched by the local villagers. However the Well House survives, and indeed looks pretty spruce and well cared for.

Records of a belief that the water had healing properties goes back to at least 1877, although the finding in the 1970s of a hoard of medieval coins, possibly an offering, suggests the place has been venerated for a lot longer. I guess don't just let your local healing well fall into ruin, though by what mechanism this building was saved whilst the rest crumbled I do not know.

There are a number of ghost stories associated with well although most, like the account of the traveller who spent the night in the well house and was accosted by a series of spectral entities, are so poorly documented to be almost worthless. In says past when the car park was open I spent the night here in the back of a transit van, and nothing happened to me.

In the even more distant past the Well House was also open to the public, and so I have drunk from it. I wasn't cured, but then I wasn't ill. Today though you can only look at the water through the barred windows. Someone will have a key, but I don't know who.

The absence of any real facts about the Well House, and the demise of the hall that gave it some context, leaves us with a true liminal place, one where the imagination takes over where reality ends. The moors, the trees and water coming from the lion's mouth are all real enough, but meaning, purpose and truth can only be found in the realm of the imagination.

Holy Well, Hollinshead Hall, Tockholes, Lancashire. The Northern Antiquarian

Hollinshead Hall Holy Well by John Crawshaw

Savernake Forest

Location: Marlborough, Wiltshire

Liminal places, by definition, are edges. It therefore follows that Savernake Forest should be disallowed as here, in the grandest of English woodlands, you don't just stand at a threshold, you plunge yourself into a different world.

It is said, quite correctly no doubt, that there was a time when a squirrel could travel the length and breadth of the country without touching the ground. in Savernake Forest you can imagine what that world would have been like.

Or you almost can, as walking in Savernake you realise how limited we humans are being unable to fly, or even climb particularly well. In a great forest like this there seems to be at least two worlds; one of the ground and the undergrowth which we experience, and another in the canopy overhead that we don't. We are like creature who live on the bottom of the ocean, and who never get to see the waves.

But whilst you may imagine that being in a big forest, like being at the bottom of the ocean, is to be lost in a place with no landmarks, in Savernake that is not the case. With a simple map it is easy to find your way about. Even without a map it is always possible to at least know where you're been, as the paths, the clearing, the density of the trees, the undergrowth, or lack of it, and above all the mighty individual trees, all provide a memorable landmarks.

And of course it is the trees that make the forest. There are mighty oaks a-plenty. Seven are names in on the OS map, which is a fairly mythic number of oaks, but there are far more with personal monikers: Big Belly Oak, Saddle Oak (One and Two), Cathedral Oak, Bumble Oak, Queen Oak, New Queen Oak, Spider Oak, Amity Oak and King of Limbs. The latter is worth finding, not only because Radiohead named an album out of it, for also because it sits in a quieter part of the forest and so, with it's huge, but lazily reclined limbs, it stands out as a destination in its own right. At least two of those trees are over a thousand years old. There is nowhere else in Europe with this many great trees.

But it's not just about oaks. There are the avenues of magnificent beech trees, as well as the weird and wonderful specimens in the arboretum, which range from a monkey puzzle tree to a mighty redwood.

As you might imagine, a place like this has acquired a fair amount of myth and legend. The nearby town of Marlborough supposedly gets it's name because Merlin was buried there, but that is surely just a medieval mistake. Ghostly horses are supposedly heard on the Grand Avenue, some with headless riders, and a large black dog is claimed to stalk the grounds of the nearby hotel.

But the truth is Savernake Forest does not need these embellishments. If you want to make the forest a true liminal area all you need to do is visit, not on a summer's day, but on a winter night, preferably when the moon is full, and the stars illuminate the forest floor through the bare branches of the trees. Add the barking of the red deer and the mating cry of a vixen, and you have as wonderful a place of mystery and terror as you could ever wish for.