St Madern’s Well

St Madern’s Well in Cornwall was a popular resort for people seeking relief from aches and pains, and Bishop Hall wrote that he had strictly examined a cure of a cripple there and found neither art nor collusion in it. The saint was always won over with offerings of pins or pebbles, and Chambers notes that pins could be gathered by the handful near most Cornish wells. The spring was also used to read the future, by shaking the ground round it and watching the bubbles that rose. By the seventeenth century, Chambers says, the well had lost much of its name for healing.