Pilgrim's Journal — St Davids: St Non's Well

When I first left St Davids, I thought my time there had come to an end.

I returned to Woodland Glade for one final month before saying goodbye to the cabin and the house that had been my home for almost a decade.

The extra month hadn't been part of the plan.

Delays had slowed the completion of the sale, though I found myself strangely unworried by them. The house had gone on the market on Friday the 13th of March and sold the very same day. Providence, it seemed, had already made its intentions known.

By then, my room was empty.

I spent those final weeks living between the Pilgrim's Wagon and the woodland cabin, inhabiting a quiet space between chapters.

Woodland Glade had spent nine years teaching me how to belong to a place.

Yet by then, the pilgrimage had already begun teaching me something deeper.

The shell-less turtle had quietly shown me that much.

Home, I was beginning to realise, was not somewhere I left behind.

Home was the pattern.

Home was the presence I carried with me.

Yet something remained unfinished.

During my first stay in St Davids, I'd somehow overlooked one place I now felt gently drawn back to visit.

St Non's Well.

It became the quiet centre around which my return naturally formed.

There were other places I was happy to revisit. I wanted to walk the familiar paths again, spend time once more in the cathedral, and simply linger a little longer in a place that had already begun to feel like a friend.

But it was the well that had first called me back.

I wanted to spend time beside the spring whose waters have accompanied St David's story for centuries.

I planned my return for the Summer Solstice.

What I hadn't realised was that it would also be Father's Day.

That discovery only came later.

When it did, something inside me became very still.

My father was part of my life as I grew up, though not in the way many children know their fathers.

We saw one another from time to time, yet he remained a distant figure.

My mum raised me.

She carried both roles with remarkable love and strength.

Several years ago, my father passed away in his sleep.

I remember arriving before the funeral with my mum, flowers in hand, and immediately feeling strangely out of place.

He had a family. A wife. Children who had known him in ways I never had.

Something inside me knew I wasn't there to enter the church.

This was their time to grieve.

So my mum and I found a bench tucked out of sight and sat together instead.

I remember looking down at the flowers in my hands and feeling their weight.

If I'm honest, they made little sense to me.

I had long since detached from my father. What I felt that day was not grief so much as confusion.

We hadn't spoken in nearly twenty years.

I wouldn't have bought him flowers while he was alive.

Why, then, was I carrying them now?

Eventually, after returning to Woodland Glade, I found myself drawn towards All Saints Church.

Flowers still in hand, I sat alone amongst the old stone, and something shifted.

Looking back now, I realise I wasn't seeking a moment of goodbye. In my own way, I had already said goodbye many years before.

What transformed within All Saints was something altogether different.

It wasn't that I encountered the Father for the first time.

I had walked with Him for most of my adult life.

Rather, it felt as though something old had finally been released.

For years, there had remained a recurring thread connecting me to my earthly father.

Not one of resentment.

Nor even grief.

Simply the lingering question that lives somewhere within us:

Will there ever be a resolution?

And then, quite suddenly, there wasn't.

The conversation was over.

The possibility of reconciliation, explanation, or understanding had quietly departed with him.

Strangely, I did not experience that as a loss.

I experienced it as a freedom.

It was as though a knot I had unconsciously carried my entire life had been cut cleanly in a single movement.

Looking back now, I can see that his departure was, in its own way, a blessing.

Not because I was glad he had died.

But because I finally understood that healing our relationship had never been my purpose.

My path had always been leading elsewhere.

Sitting peacefully within All Saints Church, I felt an unexpected lightness descend upon me.

It was not a goodbye.

It was a remembering.

A recognition.

Today, whilst writing these journals and preparing to share this entry, I found myself returning to the photographs from that day.

If I'm honest, it was the flowers that called me back. They seemed to belong here too.

Then I noticed the date.

1st November 2018.

All Saints' Day.

In All Saints Church.

I smiled.

And then I remembered why I had taken the photograph in the first place.

Pinned to the wall beside me was a small note:

"Dear Father God, thank you for inviting me to your party, yes, because I want to come!"

Somehow, I had forgotten that part of the story entirely.

It seems the photograph had remembered it for me.

I've always found these words helped express what I felt:

"Call no man on earth your father, for you have one Father, and he is in heaven." — Matthew 23:9

It did make me laugh when I realised they were written by Matthew. Though, of course, they are attributed to Jesus.

Life has a curious habit of speaking through parallels and symbols.

Perhaps all of this explains why, years later, I would find myself standing beside a holy well dedicated to a mother, on Father's Day, beneath the Summer Solstice Sun.

Then another thread gently revealed itself.

At St Davids Cathedral, I'd learned that St David's mother, Non, is remembered with extraordinary affection.

I didn't learn his father's name there at all.

The emphasis falls not upon the father, but upon the mother who carried, nurtured and raised him.

I couldn't help noticing the gentle echo with my own story.

Not because they were the same.

But because they rhymed.

My thoughts drifted further still.

The Christian story carries another echo.

We hear much of Mary.

Joseph is present in Jesus' early life, yet gradually steps from the narrative, while the mother remains vividly remembered throughout.

Whether these are simply recurring patterns within our stories, or something deeper woven through them, I cannot say.

I only know that, by then, the pattern had become impossible for me not to notice.

The path to St Non's Well was every bit as beautiful as I'd hoped.

The chapel ruins.

The cliffs.

The wildflowers.

Then the well itself, nestled amongst the old stone.

I remember slowing almost without thinking.

There was something about the whole place that immediately drew me in.

Not because it was grand.

But because it felt deeply at peace with itself.

The spring.

The weathered stone.

The white lilies rising from the damp ground.

The Radiant Mother, watching over.

The deep sense that countless pilgrims had stood here before me, each carrying their own story.

I found myself smiling.

I had taken out my phone and began recording my approach, wanting to capture something of the beauty I was experiencing.

Then I looked into the well.

For a moment...

my mind simply stopped.

I knew I was looking into a well.

I knew the water lay below.

I knew I was seeing the reflection of the water.

Yet my mind simply refused to separate the reflection from the possibility that water was flowing down the back of the well.

I realise now that I had stepped closer and disturbed a little dust from the stone, briefly transforming the reflection into what appeared to be water cascading down the wall.

Even as the ripples began to spread outwards in gentle circles, caused by the insects on the water's surface, I still couldn't shake the extraordinary illusion that the wall itself had somehow become alive with water.

I remember laughing into the camera.

"I'm so confused."

It was one of those moments when perception and understanding briefly part company.

My eyes kept saying one thing.

My mind another.

Neither seemed willing to surrender.

Only later did I begin wondering why it had looked so extraordinary.

I realised I had simply arrived during a fleeting window when the angle of the Sun transformed the well into a reflective sanctuary.

Perhaps on another day of the year, the Sun never reaches quite the right height to create it at all.

I don't know.

What I do know is that, for a few precious moments, light, water and stone came together to create something so unexpectedly beautiful that my mind simply gave up trying to explain it.

There was something profound about that.

Nothing supernatural had interrupted the laws of nature.

Nature itself had offered the gift.

The beauty wasn't despite the ordinary workings of the world.

It emerged through them.

I often think that's where the deepest wonder lives.

Not beyond the natural world.

Within it.

A few days later, I returned to the well.

I wasn't hoping to receive anything.

I simply wanted to say thank you.

Months earlier, back at Woodland Glade, I was guided into a devotional Venus ritual.

Amongst the few things I carried with me from those days was a dried rose from that ceremony.

As I walked towards the well, I also gathered a fresh rose.

One from the beginning of the journey.

One from the present.

Together they felt like a bridge between two chapters of my life.

I placed them beside the spring.

Then I filled a bottle with water from the well to carry with me on the road ahead.

It wasn't about possessing something sacred.

It was about remembering.

Remembering this place.

This feeling.

This quiet companionship that had unfolded here.

As I was preparing to leave, I noticed something I'd somehow missed during my first visit.

Set into the stone beside the spring was a small alcove.

Within it were the remains of candles.

Something in me smiled.

It felt as though the well had saved one final invitation for the very moment I was about to leave.

I knew then that there would be one more visit before I departed St Davids.

Not to seek a revelation.

Not to ask a question.

Simply to light a candle.

A small act of gratitude.

Then I would leave.

Not because I felt finished with St Davids.

Sacred places are never exhausted.

We simply meet them differently each time we arrive.

Before leaving the Pilgrim's Wagon, I found myself rummaging through a drawer looking for a candle.

Instead, two old companions seemed to present themselves.

A small marble.

And a little metal Sun disk.

For reasons I couldn't explain, they insisted on coming with me.

It wasn't until later, after placing them together upon the worktop, that I noticed what they had become.

The marble rested perfectly within the centre of the Sun, transforming it into something that looked unmistakably like a flame.

And, by the end of the day, that flame would find itself reflected beneath the waters of St Non's Well, while another burned quietly beside it.

In that moment, my time there felt complete.

Looking back, I realise I hadn't returned to St Davids because I was searching for something new.

I had returned to complete a conversation.

To thank a place that had softly welcomed me.

To honour the journey we had shared together.

Pilgrimage, I've come to realise, isn't only about discovering sacred places.

It's also about learning how to leave them.

Not by walking away.

But by carrying them with you.

I left St Non's Well with a bottle of spring water, two roses committed to the earth, and the quiet certainty that something within me had settled.

Nothing dramatic had happened.

Nothing needed to.

Sometimes the greatest gift a place can offer is the feeling that, for a little while, you belonged there.

And perhaps that is all any pilgrim is ever really searching for.

A place to arrive.

A place to listen.

A place to give thanks.

Then, when the time is right...

to continue walking.