I REFLECTED recently on the links between holidays and holy days (27 June). The two have certainly been interwoven on a Northumbrian holiday, which, every so often, shimmered into pilgrimage.

This was especially true when we strayed from the beaches and fishing ports up into upper Coquetdale in search of a village, Holystone. We were drawn there by reading an account of it in Fr John Musther’s wonderful book Sacred North, a privately printed treasure (Features, 27 April 2018).

Holystone is well off the beaten tourist track, but Sacred North assured us that there we would find two holy wells, one associated with St Ninian and the other with St Mungo. St Ninian’s Well — also known as Lady’s Well, after the Augustinian nuns whose priory near by drew water from the sacred spot, or known locally simply as “Holy Well” — proved to be a really beautiful, well-preserved, and awe-inspiring place.

I have sometimes seen holy wells neglected, covered over with bushes, dried, exhausted, choked with weeds and litter. Here, in contrast, was not only a well-kept holy well, but, around it, a sacred grove, a temenos, a sacred enclosure. You follow a clear stream from the village uphill towards its source, and, raising your eyes to the little hill above, you see a low circular stone wall with a gate and, within it, a circle of mature trees and, within that circle, a beautiful, clear rectangular pool, whose surface holds the still reflection of trees and sky.

The stream that you have been following flows from one end of the pool, where a fine statue of St Ninian stands facing the pool, in which he, and possibly St Paulinus, baptised so many of our forebears. The pool is fed from beneath by a natural spring from which, according to Sacred North, more than 500 gallons of the mysterious gift of pure water flow every minute.

In the centre of the pool stands a stone Celtic cross, and, at the further end, a little altar for celebrations of the eucharist. We stayed there for some time, and I felt my sense of wonder and awe being renewed and clarified, welling up again from within, just as surely as the clear water rose and flowed in the well.

One of the books that I had chosen for my holiday reading was Robert Macfarlane’s brilliant new book Is A River Alive? That book starts with Macfarlane going to another wellhead, another source: the Nine Wells nature reserve, on the edge of Cambridge, where water, rising from the chalk, will eventually flow down into the Cam and Granta.

It is a sacred spot for him, and the book, which follows the course of rivers in South America, India, and Canada, is punctuated by a series of returns to this local source. In one of these returns, he writes: “Springs are special places . . . living locations, alive with their own peculiar spirit.”

I happened to read that sentence a few days after my visit to St Ninian’s Well, and Macfarlane’s words were simply a confirmation of something that that sacred spring had already taught me. But it taught and teaches me more. Coleridge said that the imagination served “to make the outer inner, and the inner outer”. To have stood in the sacred enclosure at Holystone, and seen the water rising and welling from its hidden source, was to picture more clearly what Jesus meant when he promised us “a well of water springing up into everlasting life”.