Munlochy Clootie Well
I’m all up for a bit of the quirky or unusual when I travel…but M hit peak quirky in putting the Munlochy Clootie Well onto our itinerary the day we drove through the Black Isle, the promontory that lies north of Inverness in Scotland.
The Munlochy Clootie Well is a fifteen minute drive from the town of Dingwall (location of Highflight Books) on the A832 (towards Tore). After turning off the Tore roundabout, about 2 1/2 miles down the A832 there’s a green “Clootie Well” sign and this leads into a off-road carpark.
My Scots bilingual talents came to the fore on this visit – as I was able to surmise that a ‘clootie’ must be something to do with a bit of cloth. My prior knowledge of the word was its use in the name ‘clootie dumpling’ – which is a Scottish pudding steamed in a piece of cloth. So M and I thought we had the ‘clootie’ bit sorted.
A clootie or cloot is indeed a strip of cloth or rag, and in the case of the well, they are used in a healing ritual. The Clootie Well is a somewhat odd remnant of an ancient tradition of holy wells (across Scotland and Ireland) where pilgrims would come and make offerings, usually in the hope of having an illness cured. A bit of cloth belonging to someone who is ill is dipped into the well water, then hung on a nearby tree and the belief is that as the cloth disintegrates, the illness disappears.
This particular well is said to date back at least to the time of St Boniface or St Curitan, who worked as a missionary in Scotland in about AD620. The story goes that pilgrims would come to the well to carry out a ritual that involved circling the well three times then splashing some of its water on the ground and saying a prayer. Then they’d tie the cloth of an ill person to a tree. Another story is that sick children would be left at the well overnight to be cured – which seems a somewhat harsh medical treatment.
The Reformation of 1560 attempted to suppress these types of activities, and in 1581 an Act of Parliament outlawed the visiting of holy wells. A few rebel wells seem to have survived that crackdown, including the Clootie Well at Munlochy. (This article in the Scotsman describes some of the other wells around Scotland.)
Nowadays, visiting the Clootie Well has the atmosphere of stumbling onto the movie set of The Blair Witch Project. Leaving our car in the carpark, we walked with trepidation through the woodland towards the well itself. Along the way, we ducked under branches draped with an assortment of clothing. At the end of the path, the spring emerges from the hillside, flowing into a stone trough.
Today’s visitors obviously believe the ancient stories, as many, many items of clothing have been left on the trees. Forestry and Land Scotland, which manages the property, allows this practice, but asks that visitors leave small cotton or wool items – which are biodegradable. If you tie on a synthetic pair of knickers you’ll be waiting a LONG time for the healing benefit as they will never rot away.
Too many visitors are not heeding this instruction. As a result, the rangers from Forestry and Land Scotland have to arrange volunteer clean-up events for the site as the trees suffer from bearing the burden of too many inappropriate cloots.
Enjoy this magical (and just a little bit weird) place responsibly, folks!
Where it is:
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