St Tegla’s Well

Among the holy wells Chambers gathers under 1 July, St Tegla’s in Denbighshire was the resort of sufferers from the falling sickness, and it asked more of them than most. The patient bathed in the well, walked round it three times saying the Lord’s Prayer at each circuit, and left fourpence at the shrine. A cock or a hen, according to the patient’s sex, was carried in a basket round the well, into the churchyard and round the church. The patient then lay all night under the communion table with a Bible for a pillow, and if the bird died before daybreak the illness was thought to have passed into it.