Saturday morning May 15 saw members of Liskeard Old Cornwall Society (OCS) outnumbered by residents of St Keyne in a joint effort to give the Holy Well just outside the village its annual tidy up.

Two hours of weeding, bush trimming, leaf sweeping and wild garlic controlling completed the makeover for another year. The story behind the yearly clean-up is an interesting one, which is confirmed by original documentation held in the Liskeard OCS archive in Stuart House.

The site of the well of St Keyne was purchased on November 29, 1934, from John Cosmo Stuart Rashleigh for £2 by the first president of Liskeard OCS, Albert de Castro Glubb of Pendean House in Dean Street. Glubb and the OCS raised, by public subscription, the money needed to rebuild the well, which was in ‘a ruinous state’. On completion of the restoration work ownership was then conveyed by a document dated July 4, 1936, to the Rev Canon Frank Rupert Mills, rector of St Keyne Parish. The well is still owned by the church.

In 1945 Glubb set up a trust fund with £100 for the Diocese of Truro to invest and use £3 of its income for the benefit of the parish, on condition that the well was kept in a tidy state. However on November 19, 1948, the Cornish Times reported that the then vicar, former Warwickshire cricketer Jack Parsons, refused to take on the upkeep of the well and said “as to what has happened to the £3 per year in question, I have not the foggiest idea”.

The matter was resolved in 1997 when Liskeard OCS committed to the cleaning every year going forward, which they had in fact been doing for several decades earlier. This commitment meant that the trust could be closed; the balance of money went towards the installation of a new organ in St Keyne Church.

The Medieval Holy Well of St Keyne was described by Richard Carew in 1603 as being arched over by four trees; a willow, an oak, an elm and an ash. He added a rhyme to tell of the benefit to the first of newlyweds to drink from its water;

‘The quality, that man or wife,

Whose chance, or choice, attains,

First of the sacred stream to drink,

Thereby the mastery gains’.

The four trees were blown down by a storm in the mid-1700s and later another rhyme was composed by a downtrodden husband;

‘I hastened as soon as the wedding was done,

And left my wife in the porch,

But in faith she had been wiser than me,

For she took a bottle to church’.