Tradition and folk tales generally hold wells to be places of healing and good fortune - so persistent are these associations that even today we are familiar with ideas of health spas and wishing wells. Wales had many wells that were locally noted for their health-giving properties, the most famous of which is St Winefride's well, which still exists in the town it named: Holywell, Flintshire. An entirely different prospect was to be found at Llanelian-yn-Rhos (literally "the church of St Elain on the moor") in Conwy County, however, which developed a reputation as being a well for cursing rather than healing.
Origins of St Elian's Well
It is said that the well first sprang up at the request of St Elian, a 6th century holy nobleman who was one day afflicted with a great thirst. At first, the Fynnon Elain ("Elian's well") had good healing properties, and people travelled great distances to it to be cured by the waters. However, the greed and selfishness of the many visitors was thought by locals to have had a negative effect on the well, "souring" the waters over the years and givin them evil powers. Historian Richard Holland notes that "sometime after 1723, Fynnon Elian gained a quite different reputation - that of a cursing well".
The Cursing Well
Elain's Well was discovered by those who used it to have a property unique amongst Wales' wells - that it could grant favours for good or ill. Where it could heal sickness, it could just as well bring ill fortune on those who used the well to cast curses. At first, the method of casting curses was simple: the name or initial of the person to be cursed was written on a scrap of parchment (often with a bent pin thrust through it for good measure) and cast into the well. As the years passed, so the ritual developed, and visitors used slates or piece of lead to seal their curse. Figures with pins stuck in them - reminiscent of voodoo dolls - were also cast into the well.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the well became both feared and popular. The well's effectiveness lay in the power of suggestion, and people would have been terrified to think they were cursed by it - and the best way to remove a curse was (perhaps unsurprisingly) to pay up more than the person who had bought the curse in the first place. In common with many other wells in Wales, Elian's well had an appointed keeper (who lived in nearby Cefnyfynnon Farm - "the farm behind the well"), but unlike the healing holy wells, the keeper of the cursing well had a bumper business built on these fears. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales records that "the keeper was paid a substantial sum to impose or retract a curse", while according to Richard Holland, one keeper in the early 19th century was found to be earning £300 annually from charging visitors for well access - an enormous amount of money in those days.
Jac Fynnon Elian
The disorder caused by the many hundreds of visitors with their curses and counter-curses caused something of a headache for the local population. With the magistrate seemingly powerless to act, the congregation of a local Methodist chapel decided to take things into their own hands - in 1828, they destroyed the well. However, their destruction wasn't as complete as they had hoped, as local man John Evans (alias Jac Fynnon Elian) took advantage of this situation to divert the spring waters onto his own land. He became the last keeper of the well, running the business it generated for another 30 years. During this time he was tried for fraud for apparently conning people into paying him money to lift curses that had not been cast, but he was released after just a few months in prison and continued his ways.
Fynnon Elian eventually dropped out of use as a cursing well in the 1850s, and today potatoes grow over the spot where it once flowed to the surface.
Sources
Alexander, M. (2002). A Companion to the Folklore, Myths and Customs of Britain. Bath: Sutton Publishing
Holland, R. (1989). Supernatural Clwyd: The Folk Tales of North East Wales. Llanrwst: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (2008). Fynnon Elian Cursing Well.
Sharon Brookshaw - Freelance writer, university research administrator and PhD in archaeology/museum studies.
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