The ghost footpath post last week got me thinking about Roseberry Well, tucked near the summit on the northern side. It has been a fair while since I last went up — or rather down, since the best approach is from above — though it is not the sort of thing likely to have wandered off.
It was once known as Oswy’s Well, and folk swore by its healing powers. The story attached to it goes back well over a thousand years, and it is a properly sad one. I cannot vouch for the exact dates or every detail, since this comes from legend rather than any record I can check, so take the timeline with a pinch of salt.
These days the spring does not spring anything at all. The little niche is muddy even through this current drought, with lush ferns, clearly rather pleased with the damp.
The tale itself is grim stuff. A Northumbrian princess dreamed her son Oswy would drown before he grew much older, and the wise men she consulted told her the same. Desperate to dodge fate, she carried the boy to the top of Roseberry and pitched a tent there, reasoning that a mountain summit was about as far from water as she could manage. Fate, being fate, was not so easily outrun. While she slept with the child in her arms, so the story goes, a spring burst up from nowhere and drowned them both.1Cook, Hugh W. A Princess Died In Roseberry Well | Cleveland Standard | 22 July 1949 | British Newspaper Archive. [online] Available at: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0003490/19490722/034/0002 [Accessed 12 Apr. 2022].
They were laid to rest in the small churchyard at Osmotherley, and legend claims the village took its name from the sorry business, “Os-by-his-mother-lay.” Records complicate the picture rather than confirm it, though: Saxon sources call the place Teviotdale, while Domesday Book lists it as Asmundrelac. There is also a second version of the tale, gentler but no less sad, where the princess simply nods off, the boy wanders to the well alone, and she dies of grief once he is found.
Whichever version you fancy, only ferns keep the memory damp now.
- 1Cook, Hugh W. A Princess Died In Roseberry Well | Cleveland Standard | 22 July 1949 | British Newspaper Archive. [online] Available at: https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0003490/19490722/034/0002 [Accessed 12 Apr. 2022]. ↩︎
Leave a Reply