Malvern well-dressers prepare for magical unveiling in May

BBC News

18-04-2025

A full moon, a spring hare and a mermaid are just a few of the bewitching sights that may soon spring up around Malvern to celebrate the water bubbling out of the spa town's wells.Springs in Malvern can be found everywhere, some high up in the hills and others in back gardens, and 60 are being decorated for the annual well-dressings.Displays created by about 800 people - this year on the theme of fairy tale and folklore - often develop amid great secrecy, artist Phil Ironside said."Some people put extraordinary amounts of work into it and they want it to be a big reveal. It's a lot of fun," he added.
Carly Tinkler, president of the Malvern Spa Association, said the most exciting moment was seeing decorations under construction.She said one of the most moving scenes in recent years was on the theme of refugees.The design showed a boat carrying people that were transformed into doves flying away.
This year's theme of storytelling and magic is inspired by Malvern's literary connections with JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and the English medieval dream poem Piers Plowman.According to tourism body Visit the Malverns, Tolkien acknowledged the Malvern hills had inspired landscapes in The Lord of the Rings.Tourism officers also said CS Lewis, as a boy, would have encountered Great Malvern's Victorian gas lamps - unusual for their rural locations.One lamp stands behind a fir tree, similar to the scene where, in the Chronicles of Narnia, a wardrobe becomes a doorway to a spellbound, wintry world.
Since 2014, Julia Palmer-Price has decorated the Rosebank Garden Well, which was only recently discovered, because it was overgrown."All my life I have loved what you might call serendipitous acts of beauty," she said. "If you go to a festival, there are crazy people just doing things for the love of it. It's an act of service."She is part of Malvern's Interfaith group and it was during a service she stumbled on a myth about hares and the moon.
In coming up with her design, she has become intrigued by the animals, which have long been associated with Easter traditions.Her final design, to be unveiled with her singing group, will remain a closely guarded secret until May.
Sustainable materials
Malvern's festival is different to the famous Derbyshire well-dressings, where springs are traditionally decorated with pictures created out of petals pressed into clay on water-soaked, wooden frames."It's a lot more free here," Mr Ironside said.There are no rules for dressing Malvern's wells, apart from decorations must not be offensive or promote an agenda.People have free artistic reign, but they are encouraged to use sustainable materials.
The spa association has described how Malvern's Victorian heyday came when the town hosted water cures that became a local industry.After they went out of fashion, the town "went into a chrysalis", Ms Tinkler said.Research by Rose Garrard, who helped found the association, claimed the tradition of making offerings at Malvern's wells went back at least to the 12th and 13th Centuries.The organisation revived a tradition of celebrating the wells in the 1990s and the May Day well festival in its current form was established in 2001.
Yarn bomber Sue Spencer is dressing Stocks Drinking Fountain for the third year running, inspired by a famously enchanted beanstalk.She started work as soon as the theme was chosen in January, because her elements are handmade from wool.She said she loved the creativity of making the designs and that she got involved to honour nature, history and the hills.For her family, touring the wells each year has become a tradition.
Mr Ironside, who coordinates the well-dressers, has taken part himself since 2000 and is dressing the Dingle Spring.Last year, the theme was trees, and he looked at the networks of roots and fungi connecting them. Another year, he recreated the solar system. "We do all sorts of crazy, mad things," he said.Occasionally, he includes a painting, but sometimes he just makes a decoration out of wicker. "Whatever skills you have, you use for your well-dressing," he said."You become obsessed with your well, it becomes your well and you get attached."
Cheryl Britton and her husband Roger will be dressing a well once used by her great-great-grandfather Thomas Gardiner in the 19th Century.Mr Britton said the iron manhole cover over a woodland water source was "the least impressive well you can imagine", but in May, the trees will be populated with characters from trolls to ogres, and visitors will step into a fairy tale world.He described the festival as great fun and "absolutely not serious".But he said: "Actually it makes people aware of the natural resource and the landscape, and that a place is everything - environment, history and people - and to celebrate that is really important."The big moment comes in just over two weeks when the festival opens on 3 May.
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