St Mary's Well, Steyning

Dedication: Saint Mary the Virgin

Location: Steyning

Status: covered (and lost)

Although Steying is traditionally associated with the cult of St Cuthman, who reputedly constructed the surviving parish church of St Andrew, the town contained two churches at the time of the Domesday Book, both under the ownership of Fécamp Abbey in France. According to the Rev. Thomas Medland, whose Notices of the Early History of Steyning and its Church were published, in 1852, in Archaeological Collections relating to the History and Antiquities of the County [of Sussex], the second church "may have been only a chapel-of-ease", although this would be strange given its apparently central situation "on the south side of the High-street".

Medland attested that this second church's location had been discovered after it was "pointed at" by "some of the oldest inhabitants" of the parish, and that its foundations had subsequently "been dug in upon", beneath the grass of what was then "a garden". Intriguingly, Medland also wrote that this church or chapel was originally dedicated "to St. Mary"; perhaps there was once a connection between this building and Steyning's lost medieval holy well.

In fact, the earliest reference that I have found to St Mary's Well appears in Medland's paper: he attested that it had been housed in a "stone-covered recess", somewhere "at the bottom of the hill", but had been "lately covered up", presumably for the purpose of using the spring as a water supply. The only other mention that I have come across to the site dates from 1872, and appears in The Churches of Sussex, by Mark Antony Lower, who simply stated that a holy well, "now covered over", had once existed "near" the church or chapel of St Mary. Lower clearly derived his information from Medland's work.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that Medland's description of the well's location as being "at the bottom of the hill" should prove useful, no sufficiently detailed Ordnance Survey maps of Steyning were produced until 1879, by which time any trace of St Mary's Well was probably long gone. Indeed, no OS maps of the parish mark either the well or its site, and the early 19th century tithe schedule of the parish similarly fails to shed any light on the issue, so it is impossible to identify the original location of St Mary's Well. Of course, there is a chance that the spring still survives somewhere in the vicinity, perhaps still covered over and forgotten.