LETTER

from Simon Crook, Southampton:

In The Ley Hunter 83 there was a letter from Mollie Carey in which she outlines the coincidences of ‘ash’ place-names and names like Seven Wells. She connects this with a ‘Great Bear effigy’. There is a similar pattern of coincidences near Owslebury. There is a Pilgrim’s Ash a mile away, whilst a mile north is St. John’s Copse, once known as Sevynhampton. Five miles north-east is Sevington Farm, called Syvan Wyllan in 938. There was a similar correspondence of such names in Somerset: Horsington, Henstridge, Henstridge Ash and Seven Wells Down.

Nigel Pennick’s article Fragments of a universal tradition was helpful and interesting. In the Penguin Classics translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a reference (p. 123) to a fourteenth century morality play called ‘The Castle of Perseverance’, written in the north-east Midlands. In it there is an instruction for the clothing of the Four Daughters of God who eventually take charge of the Soul of Mankind:–

“The Four Daughters shall be clad in mantles, Mercy in white, Righteousness in red altogether, Truth in sad green, and Peace all in black.” Might this be a genuine local tradition in Christian clothing or a relic of gnostic teaching? The Four Daughters’ role seems similar to that of the Four Evangelists quoted in the ‘Direction’ chapter of Nigel Pennick’s book The ancient Science of Geomancy.