Madron Well

Madron Well rises from the ground in a wooded hollow near Penzance, and a stone's throw away stand the roofless walls of a medieval chapel built over an earlier Christian site. The pair form one of Cornwall's classic well-and-chapel complexes, with a documented history of cures, divination, and pilgrimage stretching back to the early modern record and much earlier in practice: the seventeenth century's famous cure by bathing and sleeping on the saint's bed, the marriage oracle of pin-linked straws whose rising bubbles foretold the years.

The best-known custom is the cloutie: strips of cloth tied to the trees along the path, each a petition to the well. The practice lapsed by the eighteen-eighties, was recorded as extinct, and has been revived, the trees clothed with rags again, the site a regular stop on Cornish pagan and Catholic pilgrimage routes alike. The honest framing, as the guides now note, is that the chapel is medieval and the well's lore is documented mainly from the early modern period onward, not the deep Celtic antiquity some guidebooks claim.

Visiting

Free, open access on the Bolitho estate via the footpath from Madron village; the well and the chapel ruin are two hundred meters apart.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Madron_Well,_Cornwall), CC BY-SA 4.0.