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The Holy Well of Whimple – The ‘White Pool’

Whimple in East Devon is a very interesting place-name. It might get overlooked as a slightly whimsical sounding, funny Old English place-name but it is actually far older than most of the Saxon place-names that surround it and hides a fascinating story and vast history behind its somewhat comical sounding name.

The place-name of Whimple is actually of British or Brythonic origin, i.e: pre Anglo-Saxon. Devon does not have as many place-name survivals from the Brythonic, Celtic era of West Country history as it’s sister county of Cornwall due to the earlier conquest by the expansion of Wessex into the Dumnonian heartlands and the subsequent migration of vast swathes of the local population from their native Dumnonia over the channel to Amorica which is now present-day Brittany. They took their Brythonic-Celtic language with them but left many villages and farmsteads abandoned, ripe for settlement by the newly arrived Saxons and Angles who simply took over the settlements they found lying empty. This explains the great abundance of farms, fields and hamlets with the names ‘Yelland’ or ‘Yolland’ which is Old English for “old land” directly referring to the fact that. this land had been long inhabited before the Saxons of Wessex arrived and lay claim to it. 

. The modern place-name of Whimple contains two elements which correspond to the modern Welsh words: ‘Gwyn’ and ‘Pwll’. Gwyn means ‘white’ or ‘holy/pure’ and Pwll means a pool or body of water. So Whimple simply translates as the white or holy pool. In Whimple itself, the stream which feeds the village is also called ‘The Whimple’. The head of the spring is at a spot called Hollyball on the borders of Whimple and Talaton parish in land now owned by the Escott Estate. This spot was first given written reference to in 1281: “Wympelwell in parochia de Taleton” (The Place-Names of Devon p.1932). The place-name of Hollyball could be a straightforward Middle English name referring to a hill (ball) where holly trees grow or modern etymologists suggest it could translate to: ‘Holy Bowl’ – another reference to the holy well at this location. Several local historic authors have made reference to the holy well at Whimple with claims to its proficiency for healing; in a report by the Committee on Devonshire Folklore of 1894, Lady Augusta Kennaway of Escot House wrote how the well water was famed for its propensity to cure eye ailments and fevers. She said that “in comparatively recent years people have been known to ride long distances to obtain a bottle of the water. At the present time it is noted as being as a particularly clear, cool spring, and considerable trouble and expense has been undertaken to conduct the water to the house at Escot, for the private use of the family. The situation and surroundings are remarkably beautiful. The well itself is in a hollow encircled by fine trees, and the view across the country, with the tors of Dartmoor on the horizon, is magnificent. I cannot ascertain that any saint’s name has ever been associated with the well, or that any shrine has ever existed there but the natural surroundings would lend itself to such a purpose most perfectly.” (Mrs F.B. Troup – member of committee on Devonshire Folklore). Whimple Folk Memories as collected by the Whimple History Society: A gentleman from the village remembers, when he was a boy, being told if he got thirsty when he was playing to go and drink water from the spring as it was good for him. The Reverend Robins, in the late 1950s would make the journey up to Hollyball to collect the water from the spring to use for baptisms at St. Mary’s church in Whimple. Many older locals in the village remember visiting the spring in their youth to collect water and hearing tales of its antiquity. A lead ampulla (pilgrims flask or trinket shaped like a shell, used to carry holy water from a religious shrine) of medieval date was found by a metal detectorist in the 1990s near Cobden within Whimple parish and is now housed in the Whimple Heritage Centre. Many more similar ampulla from East Devon can be seen at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter. Devon was once home to many holy wells including that of Saint Sidwell in Exeter which is now located beneath a cafe on Well Street. Aptly named!

Holy wells such as the one within Whimple parish would originally have started life as a watering hole and then evolved into a sacred space or shrine within a sacred grove (nymet) used by the native pre-Christian people of the West Country. The native Celtic Dumnonia tribe were Christianised very early on by visitors from the European mainland and then Ireland and Wales. When the Angles, Saxon, Frisians and Jutes first arrived in Britain they were pagans and had to play a bit of a game of catch-up with the Celtic Britons. Then of course several hundred years later when the Anglo-Saxons had eventually adopted christianity they had huge disagreements with the British regarding the correct date of Easter and how monks should wear their tonsures. With the British keeping to the old Celtic tradition and the Anglo-Saxons favouring the Roman methods. 

Having said that Whimple is undoubtedly a unique within its area, it is not entirely alone. Not far away between the parishes of Talaton, Cyst St Lawrence and Clyst Hydon is the settlement of Aunk. A very ancient Celtic place-name meaning a low hill-spur of land. The river names of Clyst (clear stream) Tale (swift one) are both of Celtic origin and the Otter (which sound deceptively identical to the aquatic animal which frequents the river) is actually a pre-Celtic name which simply meant water or river! All of these places and rivers lie in the shadow of Hamburg Hillfort, a great Iron Age construction which points to the ancient inhabitation of the area. Not so far away is Pinhoe. Hoe is Old English for a hill-spur but Pin is from Pen – the Celtic word for head. Closer again to Exeter is Wonford which sounds like a straightforward Old English place-name but actually has an almost identical meaning as Whimple because it was originally named Gwyn-Ffrwd meaning the white or holy stream. And of course Exeter comes from the Celtic name Isc or Wysg simply meaning water. The Welsh name for Devon is Dyfnaint meaning the “deep valley dwellers” which is very fitting for the region and is the name the Romans adapted when the named the kingdom ‘Dumnonia’.The Latin name for the people was the Dumnonii tribe which covered all of modern-day Cornwall & Devon and also a chunk of Somerset right up to the river Parrett which was the natural boundary of the time. And of course there are many more Celtic or pre-Saxon place-names hiding within todays modern place names. Many were taken up by the new landowners, their ancient meanings simply not understood by the speaker of the new Germanic tongue and so they made a new place name out of what the old one roughly sounded like so some OE place-names can still contain traces of much older ones, even pre-Celtic. 

Another fact to add to the mix is that the unassuming church of St. Mary’s in Whimple, a 15th century building which was heavily restored and rebuilt by John Hayward in 1845. It is not an unattractive church but the village has not been favourably described by some of Devon’s most famous historians over the years; Sabine Baring-Gould wrote of Whimple in his 1907 tour guide book simply entitled ‘Devon’: “it has a railway station on the L.&S.W.R. The church rebuilt, except the tower, in 1845. The modern reredos is very unsatisfactory in design. There was a screen in the church in 1877, that has now entirely disappeared.” And that is all he had to say about the village! Then later in 1954 W.G. Hoskins also published a book entitled ‘Devon’ and he was equally brief about the village: “Whimple lies in placid, tidy country largely given over to cider orchards. The church (St. Mary) was enlarged and rebuilt, except the tower, in 1845, and contains nothing of interest.” And apart from mentioning that Thackeray often stayed at Larkbeare Court as a schoolboy, he has nothing else to say of the village! They were both actually quite wrong about St. Mary’s because it has much of interest as a matter of fact: it has some beautiful ancient carved bench-ends which survive from the original medieval church. One features the rare pierced-heart design, one of only two to be found in Devon – the other one is in Doddiscombesleigh church in the Teign Valley. St. Mary’s has a beautiful medieval screen painted with kings of old, international and local saints including a screen painted with the figure of Saint Sidwella – so important in Devon’s history. And in recent years a wonderful discovery was uncovered: underneath the Victorian whitewash on the north wall was uncovered a beautiful medieval mural of Saint Christopher and Whimple History Society gave a talk about it in St. Mary’s church on the evening of the 23rd of November 2022. They also held a free public talk about Whimple’s holy well in St. Mary’s church on the 2nd of May 2024. The biggest thing these Devon historians overlooked about Whimple is that St. Mary’s church is actually a lann (or lan) site. A lann is a church built on a raised platform area of land which is usually in an oval or rounded shape. Almost without exception these specific lann-style church sites denote a sacred site that was once the location of pre-Christian worship before it was taken over by Christians as a a space for them to conduct their own worship. Initially a church of cob or wood would have been erected and then some centuries later churches of stone were built in their place. St. Mary’s in Whimple sits dominating the village square (where the Whimple stream runs through the middle) on a raised oval shape of land with Church Road bending around it on one side and thatched cottages on the other.

The Linguistic Clue: A Surviving Brythonic Name: The strongest evidence for Whimple being an unbroken Dumnonii settlement is its very name. When the Anglo-Saxons migrated into East Devon around 700 AD, they aggressively renamed almost every settlement they took over using Old English endings (such as -ton, -ham, or -ford). A village keeping a Celtic name meaning “Holy Pool” strongly suggests that the site was already an important, respected Dumnonii religious centre that the arriving Saxons did not dare or want to re-brand. Whimple completely resisted this. It retains its pure Brythonic Celtic name, appearing ir the Domesday Book as Winpla. It derives from the Celtic elements corresponding to the modern Welsh gwyn (meaning white, pure, or holy) and pwll (meaning a pool). 3. The Water Connection: Hollyball = Holy Well. As recognised with St Petroc’s missions, Celtic lann sites were almost always anchored by a sacred water source. Whimple has exactly this. Even into the 20th century, Whimple’s vicars insisted on collecting water from this specific ancient spring to perform baptisms inside St Mary’s. This represents an unbroken line of water-reverence stretching straight back to Dumnonii animism. The stream flowing through the village rises at a local spring historically called Hollyball (or Wympelwell in ancient deeds). Etymologists suggest Hollyball mutates from “Holy Bowl”. Local folklore recorded that the spring water possessed miraculous properties for healing eye ailments and fevers. The St Mary Dedication: Shifting Pattern. While the church is currently dedicated to St Mary, this does not disprove a Celtic origin. When the Anglo-Saxon bishops took administrative control of Devon’s older British churches, they systematically re-dedicated early Celtic sites to mainstream biblical figures like St Mary, St Peter, or All Saints to align the region with Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Proximity to Iron Age Power: Whimple sits just a few miles down the road from Hembury Fort, the massive Iron Age tribal capital. Recent archaeological trench evaluations around Whimple (such as at Straitgate Farm) have unearthed substantial Middle-to-Late Iron Age open settlements right outside the village. The Dumnoni were heavily active in this immediate valley for centuries before Christianity arrived. If you were to draw a checklist for a lost lann site, Whimple checks every single box: a prominent raised church site, an intact 2,000-year-old Celtic name, a revered holy spring feeding the settlement, and dense Iron Age tribal surroundings. It is one of East Devon’s finest hidden examples of sub-Roman continuity.

Bilingual Co-Existence, Not Extermination. To adopt an existing place name, the invading Anglo-Saxons had to listen to and talk with the people already living there. If the Saxons had simply wiped out the population of Whimple, they would have named the empty valley after their own chieftain (e.g., “Willa’s Farm” or “Badda’s Valley”). Instead, they learned that the locals called the holy stream the Winpla (“Pure Pool”) and they kept it. This proves there was a prolonged period of bilingualism, where Dumnonii families and Saxon settlers were living right next door to each other, sharing boundaries and vocabulary. Cultural Hybrid Names (The “Combe” Explosion) Sometimes, the absorption was so seamless that the two languages fused together. The best example in Devon is the word “Combe” (from the Celtic Cwm, meaning a deep valley). Devon has the highest concentration of

“combe” place names in England. The Saxons liked the Celtic word so much they completely stole it, pairing it with their own Saxon names. For example, Babbacombe combines the Saxon personal name Babba with the Celtic word Cwm (“Babba’s Valley”). When you find a Celtic name in Devon, it means you are looking at a pocket of high-density Dumnonii survival. The Saxons did not leave them alone out of kindness; they left them alone because it was far more profitable to tax an existing, highly skilled farming community than it was to slaughter them and rebuild the valley from scratch.

So Whimple sits within a very busy and fascinating landscape. Hollyball itself sits on top of a very prominent ridge which can be seen for miles round the locality and the road it leads on to is called Straightway Head. This is quite a common Middle English road name for a ridgeway and the head part simply points to it being at the top of a high hill. In the days of Hollyball being a famous site of local pilgrimage it would have been a most auspicious location and easy for travellers to make a bee-line for. Hollyball and Straightway Head are also a short walk away from the Roman road (the old A30 which is now called B3174) – the stretch between Exeter and Honiton which forms the westernmost end of the Fosse Way so the Holy Bowl at the White Pool has been an attraction for over two thousand years! In the early days of Christianity before churches were built, worshippers would used pre-existing holy sites for open air worship and celebrations. sacred groves and holy wells were the very places that early Christians commodified for their worship and we know that Celtic Christianity involved a lot more nature-worship that the Roman continental version of christianity that eventually replaced it. Later in medieval times holy wells became tourist destinations and pilgrimage was hugely popular, both local, national and international. Local places of pilgrimage were very important to people if they couldn’t travel far and water from holy wells was believed to hold incredible properties for healing nearly every ailment so in times before standardised medicine they were also highly valued. Ampulla would have been sold at the sight or nearby to visiting pilgrims in which to collect a small vial of the precious holy water which they would squeeze shut at the top and wear around their necks for safety and also personal protection. I can’t vouch for the efficacy of the holy water but I do worry about what the effects of wearing lead against the skin might do to people! much less drinking the leaden water at a later date in order to become well again! The evidence suggests that the holy well at Whimple was in the shape of a round or circular shaped pool where visitors would have gathered. Sadly it has now fallen into disrepair and is very overgrown and because the land is now privately owned by the Kennaway family of Escot House is it not possible to visit the site. Also in the 20th century the Kennaway Family began using the water from the spring at Hollyball for their own purposes and installed a drainage system to syphon off the water. It is sad that a holy well that was once so famous that an entire village was named after it has since been forgotten by time almost entirely and barely recorded in history books at all. So much to the point that most people would not be able to tell you the origin of the place-name ‘Whimple’ and might suspect it has something to do with the head garment worn around the head and neck by medieval nuns! Which of course is a false friend. And now with the hugely influx of newcomers to the village after the demolition of the Whiteways Cider Factory (who made delicious Devon cider using local apples and water from a holy stream) and the building of the Bovis Home Estate in its place and now the terrifying encroachment of “Cranbrook” and the other irrelevantly named, monstrous new towns of cardboard houses the government insists must be built all over the ancient countryside, people who are the tradition-bearers of local history that was passed down by worth of mouth from one generation to the next will soon be lost. That is why it is so important for stories like the Holy Well of Whimple at Hollyball – the ‘Holy Bowl’ must be preserved and told anew and hopefully one day, increased interest might spark the rejuvenation and restoration of this incredibly important historic site.

“A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us”. Lucy Larcom