The treacle well at Binsey: a short history of a strange word
Most people who hear about the treacle well at Binsey assume someone is having them on. It does sound like a joke — and Lewis Carroll, who knew Oxford as well as anybody, was certainly enjoying the joke when he had the Dormouse tell the story of the three little sisters living at the bottom of one in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But the well is real, the legend behind it is older than Carroll by the better part of a millennium, and the strange word at the centre of it tells you almost everything you need to know about how the English used to think about water, healing and holy ground.
"Treacle" did not always mean treacle
In modern English, treacle is a sticky black syrup you put on porridge. In Middle English — and in the Greek and Latin it came from — triacle meant something quite different: a healing balm, an antidote, the kind of restorative liquid an apothecary might keep for snake bites and fevers. By the time pilgrims were walking the lane to Binsey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, calling a holy spring a "treacle well" was simply calling it a healing well. The sweetness came later, as the word migrated and narrowed.
St Frideswide and the spring
The story attached to Binsey is the story of St Frideswide, Oxford's own patron saint and a figure who hovers somewhere between history and legend. She was an eighth-century Saxon princess who, refusing a forced marriage to a Mercian prince, fled to the woodlands at Binsey and hid there as a nun. When her pursuer was struck blind, she is said to have prayed at this spot; the spring rose from the ground, and the water restored his sight. The chapel at Binsey grew up around the well, and for several centuries it was one of the busier pilgrimage sites in the Thames valley.
What you actually see today
The well sits a few steps west of St Margaret's Church, behind a low iron rail, reached by a short flight of mossy steps that drop into the ground. There is no fanfare. The water is clear, slow and cold. A small painted sign tells you the bare bones of the story and asks you to be respectful. Most visitors stand for a moment, read the panel, and then go quiet — which is, on the whole, the right response.
Why it is worth the walk
The treacle well is not, in any modern sense, a sight. It is a small, ordinary, beautiful thing in a small, ordinary, beautiful place. What makes it worth the half-hour walk from the centre of Oxford is the sense of standing inside an extremely long line of people who have done exactly the same thing for almost a thousand years — Saxons, mediaeval pilgrims, Victorian dons, a young mathematics lecturer called Charles Dodgson, and now you. Few places in England wear their history so lightly.
If you are planning a visit, our homepage guide to Binsey sets out the easiest walk in from Jericho, and our piece on Port Meadow covers the route across the common in more detail.
Back to the journal index, or read about the church and the treacle well.