THE CLOOTIE WELLS
I actually wrote and published this over at my old blog almost exactly 4 years ago. It’s had a lot of traffic over the years, but it’s high time I had a proper website to show it off in. So here it is. I’ve yet to decide whether I’ll get rid of the old blog or not. But from now on, everything I make, will be here.
An ancient convErsation
I write this, not for sympathy, but to give you an understanding of the wilderness that unexplained ill health can drop you into, and the psychology that fuels The Clootie Wells themselves and the project about it that I am currently working on.
Way back in the mists of time, I think sometime around 2012, following a long and difficult infection and over 6 months on antibiotics, I started to feel weak as a kitten. Foods that I loved started making me feel extremely ill, and then one night I woke up in abject terror.
I felt as if all my limbs and the right side of my face were on fire. Not just a burning sensation, a “wake up with your eyes wide open in fear, and your back arching in pain” burning sensation. It wasn’t a one-off either, it happened repeatedly.
Sometimes mid-sleep, I’d sit bolt upright because I felt like my heart would stop if I didn’t; other times I’d wake up burning and suffering from a terrifying symptom known as nystagmus, where one ( not both ) of my eyes vibrated rapidly.
I became an irritation to most of my GPs. I was unexplainable, I was frustrating and so I got labelled as anxious ( well yes, I’m anxious about the burning excruciating pain, thanks for asking ).
Eventually I found a couple of great, very patient doctors who knew that I was trying to grasp for explanations and legitimacy. I was searching for belief. Most of all, I just wanted to know that this, whatever it was, wouldn’t kill me. A question for which I got worryingly few answers.
It was a years long fight for diagnosis and treatment. In the end I got told I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue which, in part at least, vindicated my fight.
Those years were desperate, and to this day I sometimes still struggle to cope with the pain and tiredness that I’ve been left with. I still struggle to explain why some days I can barely move, while others I’m almost fine.
People come to all sorts of conclusions when they are desperately seeking answers...
They have done for thousands of years. Arguably, all belief systems come from that desperate search for an explanation.This is very tangible at the Clootie Wells. Particularly the one I’ve been working on in Munlochy on the Black Isle, in the Highlands of Scotland.
The Clootie Wells are an ancient collection of wells that date back to Celtic times, thousands of years ago, that have over the aeons had the same use, but transitioned from Celtic belief to Christian and now arguably back to something more like it’s original intention.
The name “Clootie” stems from the Scots word “cloot” which simply means cloth. The idea is that you dip a cloot, mostly just a strip of cloth from your own clothes, into a sacred well in the middle of the wood, and while it’s wet you tie it around a branch. Then as time does its work and the cloot decays, the story goes that it takes your ailments with it.
This has been the tradition for a very long time indeed, and people still do it now, in larger numbers than you might imagine. Over the centuries, the wells have been absorbed into local Christian tradition. possibly because it was a convenient way to get local Celts to convert.
Certainly in Ireland, many of St Patrick’s holy healing wells also come with the tradition of tying cloots to a hawthorn tree. In my opinion, it’s no accident that an alternate meaning for the word “cloot” evolved over the course of this transition. Cloven hoof. The feet of the Devil himself.
Of late though, certainly at Munlochy it seems that while there are modern religious references in some artefacts left in the trees there, there has definitely been a return to more “Celtic” or pagan reasoning for leaving cloots there. When I went there to tie my cloot round the tree, it wasn’t for the touristy purposes of taking part, nor was it for any lack of rationality, and it certainly wasn’t an offering to a local saint. It was part desperation, part “what harm can it do”, and partly a conversation.
The Clootie Wells, if nothing else are the sage, nodding head of ancient wisdom. The Celts and the Gaels and Christians and the modern day ordinary people like me. They offer understanding, more than a cure. They speak into the ages and say:
“I know how you feel. I know your fears, I know your hopes.
I know what it is to be in this wilderness you find yourself in.
I may not know who you are, but I do know your pain”.
And so I returned last November with a camera in hand, to try and show this through the objects that hang from these sacred trees. The objects themselves have evolved*. No longer just strips of cloth, but often sacrifices of more fully formed items of clothing. Everywhere I looked, human forms either in their entirety or in more grisly disembodied forms emerged from the forest.
Some of these were almost deliberately hung to resemble human form, others seem to coalesce into dark figures.
As I silently wandered the wood, the cloots deadening the sound, wherever I looked there was a conversation in flow. It might stretch back a day or a year, or tens of years; who even knows what the oldest cloot in there really is? Even without the most ancient of cloots there, that conversation still echoes back to the beginning of this tradition.
I wonder about the children’s clothes, the soft toys and my heart breaks because what if that was an act of desperation? I wonder about the bra and the boxer shorts and whether or not they refer to anything about their illness or are just dark humour meant to make us smile a little.
I’m more than a little perplexed by the chainsaw I found high in the tree.
The stories of grief, and the stories of growth and expanding families are self-explanatory, but show that this is a place where people truly come to send a message.
So that’s what this project is. It’s an examination of these stories, this place, and, I hope, an explanation for why after thousands of years we still do it. It is, I hope, an ear to the conversations that flow through these wells.
*There is an ongoing problem with some new types of "cloot". The modern materials they are made from do not biodegrade, posing an environmental problem alongside the push/pull between ancient and modern belief.
It also poses a philosophical quandary. How can the cloots do their work if they won't fade away?
I’m really proud to have exhibited this work as part of Transient Collective alongside talented photographic artists Anneleen Lindsay, Camila Cavalcante, Adam Fowler, Kath Polley, and Phil Lavery at the Patriothall Gallery, Stockbridge, Edinburgh from the 9th to the 24th of March, 2019.
FOOTNOTESThese days you can find Christi on Instagram. See what he's complaining about here: https://www.instagram.com/pixelchristi/