The Helly-Well wake at Blencogo

On the second Sunday in May the young people of all the villages round Blencogo met at Helly-Well, a spring beside St Cuthbert’s Stane on the common, for an afternoon of country sports. It was the village wake, and unlike other wakes no strong drink was ever seen there, only the water of the well. A curate put a stop to it some twenty years before Hutchinson wrote, as a profanation of the Sabbath, which the parish account’s writer thought a pity.