The mountain spring that feeds our house froze during the first ground frost, and we had no water.
The builder boyfriend filled a bucket from the fountain in the garden so we could flush the loo. This really is living in faded grandeur.
I spent the evening worrying about how we had cursed ourselves by drinking and bathing in holy water
We are waiting on various tradesmen to turn up and do things to the plumbing in our run-down Georgian pile. We know we might have to drop a bore hole. But until then the water coming out of our taps is from a ‘holy well’.
The stream pools into a grotto on the lane, a shrine with rocks around it that occasionally attracts a pilgrim who comes with a bottle and fills it from the waters.
Some of these grottos dotted around Cork and Kerry have statues of Mary, but this one doesn’t. We do have a statue of Mary the builder boyfriend rescued from a skip in south London. She was in our garden in Surrey until we moved and is resting in his builders’ yard because we had to leave all the garden ornaments behind when the removal lorry was full.
We intend to bring Mary here as soon as we can, to put her in the grotto where homage is paid to this spring water, because when we looked it up, we found some astonishing information.
This water is legally ours to use, by the way. We have it in the deeds of the house, a historic right to draw water from the source on the land above us, which is owned by a neighbouring farmer who, happily enough, is very much our sort of person and has quickly become one of our best friends.
There is a thin black water pipe plumbed into the land, which lies about at various points of the lane in the gutter. There is no mains water or gas up here. We are almost entirely off grid.
And now three months into our new life, we discover that the water freezes as soon as there is a ground frost.
We were most worried for the horses when the yard tap seized up. We found ourselves that frosty morning kneeling beside the stream at a lower point to the grotto to see if we could capture water where it was still running.
The builder b took a can and some pipe from an old vacuum cleaner and after fiddling awhile he got the stream flowing into the can.
We topped the horses’ water buckets but he was almost panicking about what the freezing of our water supply in relatively mild temperatures meant.
I have never seen the BB almost panic before so when he did it was not something I wanted to acknowledge. I tried to ignore it but all day he went back and forth to the grotto faffing and fulminating. He lagged the water tank on the upstairs outside wall of the house. Then he started banging on about how we needed a massive water storage tank in the yard for emergencies.
Then he spent hours poking about on his phone and by the time the taps were running again he had discovered the following article on the internet entitled ‘The holy wells of Cork and Kerry’. And this really put shivers up my spine. Our well is called the Eye Well. Legend has it that believers came from far and wide to bathe their faces in it because it was thought it cured the blind.
‘Water from a holy well should only ever be used for healing purposes,’ said the article, ‘and if attempting to use it for domestic activities – washing your petticoats, making a cup of tea – things could go horribly wrong.’
I spent the evening worrying about how we had cursed ourselves by drinking and bathing in holy water. I saw myself splashing this precious water gratuitously on my face morning and night…
And then I remembered.
A few weeks ago, I started having headaches. I went to the optician in our nearest town, a harbour on the wild Atlantic coast.
In this windswept frontier of a place, I was delighted to find a very knowledgeable optician in a small shop who tested my eyes and told me that the reason I could not see through my contact lenses any more was that my eyesight had got better.
‘What about the astigmatism in my right eye?’ I asked, because I had been to the optician in the UK only a few months earlier, and she had said that, as always, my right eye was particularly problematic, and the astigmatism in it was getting worse.
‘Astigmatism?’ he said. ‘You don’t have astigmatism. Your right eye is better than your left eye.’
All ye of little faith can blame one optician or the other. I’m putting Mary in the grotto.
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