On Soutra Hill, the most westerly ridge of the Lammermoors,
once stood the hospital built by Malcolm IV., about 1164, for the
reception of wayfarers. It was dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Every
vestige of the building was removed between forty and fifty years
ago except a small aisle, appropriated in the seventeenth century by
the Pringles of Beatman's Acre as a burial vault. A short distance
below the site of the hospital is a spring of pure water, locally
known as Trinity Well. In former times it was much visited for
its healing virtues. A similar reputation was for long enjoyed by
St. Mungo's Well, on the west side of St. Mungo's Hill, in the parish
of Huntly, Aberdeenshire. In Fortingall parish, Perthshire, on the
hillside near the Old Castle of Garth, is a limpid spring called by
the natives Fuaran n' Gruarach, and also Fuaran n' Druibh Chasad,
signifying the Well of the Measles and the Well of the Whooping-Cough
respectively. Mr. James Mackintosh Gow describes the locality in an
article in the eighth volume of the "Proceedings of the Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland" (new series). He says, "It was famous in the
district for the cure of these infantile diseases, and nearly all I
spoke to on the subject had themselves been taken to the well, or had
taken their own children to drink the water; and when an epidemic
of the maladies occurred my informant remarked on the curious and
amusing spectacle the scene presented on a summer morning, when groups
of children, with their mothers, went up the hill in procession. The
last epidemic of whooping-cough occurred in 1882, when all the children
of the neighbourhood were taken to the well." Some forty yards higher
up the slope than the well, is an earth-fast boulder of mica schist,
having on one of its sides two natural cavities. The larger of these
holds about a quart and is usually filled with rain water. "It was the
custom," Mr. Gow tells us, "to carry the water from the well (perhaps
the well was at one time at the foot of the stone) and place it in
the cavity, and then give the patients as much as they could take,
the water being administered with a spoon made from the horn of a
living cow, called a beodhare or living horn; this, it appears,
being essential to effect a cure." On the farm of Balandonich,
in Athole, is a spring famous, till a comparatively recent period,
for the cure of various maladies. A story is told in the district of
a woman, unable to walk through rheumatism, having been brought in a
wheel-barrow from her home four miles away. She bathed her limbs in
the spring, and returned home on foot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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