Supervisor: Nick Mayhew Smith
Natural water has attracted veneration, worship and a wide range of ritual activities for millennia, cultic practices even surviving transitions between different religions and changes in dominant cultures. This programme of research will examine some of the very long narratives that have developed around sacred water courses, including springs, wells, lakes, rivers and the sea, examining their lingering cultural footprint in the 21st century. It will focus on the extent to which popular imagination and memory can help efforts to conserve and restore these natural phenomena. Ritual activities and communal attachments include bathing traditions, the presumed health-giving properties of natural water sources, legends of aquatic creatures and spirits, and water as a place of healing and rebirth. The researcher will select a range of springs, ponds and other natural bodies of water and examine both their long history of devotional use and their ongoing significance to their local community today. This will involve historical research, including local history archives, which will be set alongside field studies of the cultic and ritual practices that have developed today, including site survey, observation and interviews with devotees and more casual site visitors. The project takes an innovative approach in placing traditional cultic rituals and folk attachment to sacred sites in dialogue with modern perceptions and practices that continue to cluster around natural water sources and bodies. Discerning some of these long narratives that connect people to place will ultimately shed new light on the enduring influence spiritual concern can have on efforts to conserve and value natural heritage.
