Well-dressing is a slightly odd and very English custom. In its refined form, it's almost confined to Derbyshire although there are similar ceremonies elsewhere in the UK that are conscious copies. Throughout the summer, wells and other bodies of water are decorated with pictures made of flowers on a bed of damp clay. The designs usually last for a week or less before the flowers have died off, and frequently take longer than that to make. As with many traditions, the roots are lost. Probably, it's a development of the European custom of decorating saints' wells with bouquets on the saint's day. This itself is the Christianised vestige of early ritual celebrating the healing miracle of clean water. There are, of course, many other possible explanations - what matters most, is that this is a marvellous community event.

A number of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of the team which dressed the "Town Well" at Eyam. A friend knew the couple, Wendy and Eddie, who had designed the dressing that year - they were worried about whether they would be able to complete it in time. More effort was needed and favours were called in. I doubt that my employers ever understood why I took two days off work to travel 500 miles, sleep in a field and spend four days sticking flower petals onto a bed of clay. I'm not even entirely certain why I told them what I was going to do - some last vestige of a rebellious streak, perhaps.. I can't find my photographs of that event at the moment, but a friend asked me to scan these images for a school project and it seemed to me that a few words on well-dressing wouldn't go amiss.

 
There are three well-dressings at Eyam, one of which is actually of a horse-trough. That's fairly standard: "wells" range from horse troughs or ornamental pools to wells like this - the ornate "Hall Well" at Tissington. I spent a happy time as an honorary member of the Eyam community: I was allowed to mark out parts of the clay and to sort blue hydrangea petals into piles of different shades. I doubt anyone except the designers had a clear idea of how the design would look when finished, since the area for actually making the thing was cramped and the boards that make up the dressing are quite large. We just took it on trust that everything would work out in the end - much like a large software project but with tighter deadlines.

I knew I had been accepted when I was trusted to get bottled beer for those touchy moments around four o'clock when the long-suffering pub had shut. I was even part of the emergency team when it was discovered that the barley used to make two sheep at the bottom of the picture had started to sprout. (It was a race against time to replace it all with hulled rice - the tractor was due to take the dressing to the well at first light.) Few things have given me so much simple pleasure as seeing the completed design in the early dawn, with the hydrangea petals actually looking like light shining through a stained-glass window.