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Yesterday for me was the finale of the Well Dressing. We went over for the afternoon to Tissington with 4 friends. It was good to see the carpark busy & was being very expertly manned by Debbie & Trevor – no cars crashed on their watch. We started at Hands well, which had the same internal design as the well I was helping with, it was smaller but with two fantastic side columns representing the battlefields of WW1.

We gently strolled up the hill, calling in to see the local art of Roger Allen, such incredible photographic like detail, that I can recognise the valleys & hills around here. We spent 25 minutes in the Methodist Church listening to the super presentation about the history of the well dressings, this is our third time there and we never tire of it – if you get the chance go – it’s suitable for all ages.

Then we visited coffin well, this bible reading was selected because it was used exactly 100 years ago on the same well but with a different design. From there we went to the village hall to indulge in some of their super cakes – 4 of us had the date & walnut – highly recommended. Outside is the Tissington Pre-school well, which is so sweet, the children have used mainly whole flowers which is much easier for their finger to cope with.

Then it was back to Town Well…

…and a gentle stroll to Yew Tree Well.

This was the well that I had spent the early part of the week on. It does look lovely, the camomile heads really make the design stand out and considering the hail storm only a small number of petals were actually lost. Being full of cake we didn’t call in at The Stables, but lots were enjoying the food. The Hall well was delightful depicting the tomb on Easter Sunday.

From there we visited the Children’s well & some of you guessed correctly, it was a Dalek, they were so determined to get this character in to their design & how appropriate “Help exterminate breast cancer”.

What a wonderful tradition this is, I feel really honoured to have been involved and proud to show it off to my friends. If you haven’t had the chance to go, why not drive or walk across today or tomorrow – a perfectly relaxing day.

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I have to be honest I was working today so couldn’t make the service at Tissington. The church was full and people had to stand outside to listen to the Ascension Day service. Afterwards led by the Bishop everyone proceeded around the wells where a hymn was sung & the wells blessed. There was a large number of people admiring all the work, enjoying the sun & waiting for teas. I intend to visit over the weekend, then I will put a final post on including pictures of the wells that have not already photographed.

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Day 4, everything has to be finished and part of the team worked until 11pm last night, rumour has it that the bottle of port helped! This morning I just concentrated on the background, thousands of camomile heads. The photo below shows the use of various leaves to form part of the hills in the centrepiece and then primulas picked from gardens to create the folds in the gown.

This evening it was time to put up all the well dressings, however just as the tractor was loaded, it broke down and the heavens opened, not only with rain but hail. Would the boards survive once raised vertically?

The pictures really do not do justice to the nailbitting agonising as we watched the men lift the 5 sections into place. Stephen was up the tree with ropes and the others were either on the ground or in the trailer. Fingers inevitably squashed various bits of clay and this wasn’t helped by the hail which unfortunately caused further saturation and meant that some of the petals & leaves slipped. When we create the dressings we work from bottom to top, so that the petals are rather like feathers on a bird and any rain will just run down the petals & drip off, but if the boards are flat when it rains then it just soaks in. Using spare flowers we filled the gaps and stood back in the near darkness and proudly admired our painstaking work.

Don’t forget the Well Dressings are open from tomorrow, with the blessing commencing at 11am.

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This blog is not X-rated, but merely a new word that I learnt whilst working at Tissington today. This was the first morning of really getting our hands dirty. The designs for the Well Dressing had been marked on the clay & now we had to outline everything in either tiny coffee beans, which are carefully placed on their side, all facing the same way

or we had to use Black Knobs – in laymans terms the cones from the Alder tree, but this sounds far less exciting. It is a pretty painstaking procedure as the cones are only the size of the tip of your little finger.

There you are hunched up over the boards, back aching, freezing cold and covered in clay – it’s fantastic. After 4 hours of this the outline was finished and we started filling in the background, either with small pieces of parsley or with the minute head of the camomile flower – making certain that they were the correct way round. I’ve probably covered about 30cm in this way, only another 5 metres to go. Guess what I’m doing tomorrow!

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