The Clootie Wells

If you walk through the woodland near Munlochy on the Black Isle, you can tell when you are getting close to the well before you reach the water.

The trees are covered in cloth.

Small strips of cotton hang beside old ribbons, scraps of shirts and pieces of fabric faded almost to the colour of the bark. Some are recent. Others have been there long enough for wind, rain and Scottish weather to begin taking them apart.

They are cloots, from the Scots word for a rag or piece of cloth, and the practice is connected with one of Scotland's oldest and most persistent forms of folk healing. At its simplest, a cloot was dipped in the water of a healing well and tied to a nearby tree. At some wells the cloth had belonged to, or touched, the person who was ill. As the rag decayed, the sickness was supposed to diminish with it. Forestry and Land Scotland still describe the Munlochy tradition in essentially those terms and ask modern visitors to use small pieces of biodegradable wool or cotton so that the cloot can disappear as it was meant to.

I can understand the appeal immediately. You take something connected with the person you are worried about, carry it to running water, tie it to a tree and leave the illness there to rot away. There are considerably worse ways of expressing hope.

THE WATER CAME BEFORE THE CLOOT

Scotland once had an enormous number of wells and springs associated with healing, saints, pilgrimage and particular ailments. Some were believed to help with eye disease, while others attracted people seeking relief from headaches, infertility, mental illness or more general sickness. St Triduana's Well at Restalrig, for example, became particularly associated with diseases of the eyes, while traditions at other Scottish wells involved drinking, washing, circling the water or leaving offerings.

This is also where we must be careful with the phrase ancient Celtic tradition. Sacred water existed long before the modern clootie wells, and there is good evidence that wells remained important through medieval Christianity and into later folk practice. What is much harder to prove is that somebody tying a rag to a tree today is performing an unchanged ritual passed intact from pre-Christian Scotland.

That is rarely how traditions work. Places acquire saints, rituals change and old explanations are replaced by new ones. A healing spring can become a Christian pilgrimage site, later be condemned as superstition and still remain somewhere local people quietly visit long after everyone has stopped agreeing about why the water matters. The interesting thing is not that nothing changed, but that people kept going back.

THE CLOOT HAD A JOB

At some rag wells, the important part was not just leaving an offering. The cloth represented the sick person.

Descriptions of the Munlochy tradition record the use of clothing belonging to the person who was ill, with the sickness understood to pass into the fabric before it was left to decay. Removing the cloot was therefore not something to do casually. If the illness had been left with the rag, nobody particularly wanted to take either of them home again.

We have seen this kind of bodily connection before on Shelf Three. The urine in a witch bottle remained connected with the person it came from, while a worn shoe may have mattered precisely because it had moulded itself around one particular body. At the clootie well, a piece of clothing that had touched the sufferer could stand in for them.

The logic is different, but the body keeps leaving something behind. Here, though, nobody is being attacked. The illness is simply given somewhere else to go.

MUNLOCHY HAS ITS OWN COMPLICATED HISTORY

The Clootie Well near Munlochy is now the best-known Scottish example. It lies on the Black Isle and is commonly associated with St Curetán, also known in later tradition as Boniface. The woodland is now managed by Forestry and Land Scotland, which continues to recognise the well as a place connected with healing and cloot-leaving.

The history is not as simple as saying people have performed the identical ritual at this exact spring since the early Christian period. William J. Watson, writing about the placenames of Ross and Cromarty in 1904, recorded the hill beside the well as being associated with fairies and described its holy well as once having been “in great vogue” and still being visited. That gives us firm evidence that the place had an established reputation more than a century ago, but it does not give us an uninterrupted line back through every previous century.

The Black Isle also had other rag wells. Craiguch Well near Avoch was described in the nineteenth century as a place still visited at the beginning of summer, and local people later remembered walking there and tying cloots during the twentieth century. Fresh offerings have continued to appear there much more recently.

I like that because it prevents Munlochy becoming the entire story. These were local places, and people knew which well belonged to their community.

CULLODEN HAD RULES OF ITS OWN

In Culloden Wood, not far from the battlefield, St Mary's Well still has cloots tied around the surrounding trees. The site was already being recorded as a clootie well by the nineteenth century, but the ritual there developed its own details. One version required the visitor to walk around the well three times at sunrise before tying the rag to a tree, while the cloth itself could be understood as an offering in return for the healing being requested.

Three turns appear so often in folk ritual that I am beginning to suspect nobody in historical Scotland ever went around something twice and thought, that'll do.

Other wells had their own instructions. Certain days could matter, the water might be drunk or used to wash the affected part of the body, and visitors sometimes moved around the spring sunwise before leaving coins, cloth or other offerings. There was never one national clootie-well ceremony. The well was local, and so were the rules.

THE REFORMATION DID NOT APPROVE

By the late sixteenth century, pilgrimage to wells had become exactly the kind of practice Scotland's Protestant authorities wanted stopped. In 1581, the Scottish Parliament prohibited pilgrimage to chapels, wells and crosses as remnants of idolatry and superstition, with substantial penalties attached to disobedience.

The law tells us something important, because governments generally do not spend much time banning customs nobody is practising. Holy wells remained significant enough for church and state authorities to worry about them, and later records show that visits, offerings and healing traditions continued despite repeated attempts at suppression.

Even Glasgow had a holy well associated with St Tenew, the mother of St Mungo. Women visited it, left offerings and drank the water in the hope of health, protection and good fortune. That detail is useful because sacred wells are easy to imagine as belonging only to remote glens, islands and wooded Highland places, when in reality, similar beliefs existed in and around towns as well.

People brought the same hopes wherever they lived: keep me healthy, protect my family, help this person recover, make this better. Religious authorities could object to the ritual, but that did not necessarily remove the reason people felt drawn to the water.

THE CLOOT WAS SUPPOSED TO ROT

The decay was not incidental to the ritual. At wells where the cloth was understood to carry illness, its gradual disappearance was part of what gave the act meaning.

A small piece of wool, linen or cotton could weather, fray and eventually return to the woodland. Modern textiles have complicated that considerably. Visitors now leave synthetic ribbons, scarves, socks and other objects containing plastic fibres which can remain wrapped around branches for years instead of decaying. Forestry and Land Scotland therefore ask anyone leaving a cloot at Munlochy or Culloden to use a small piece of biodegradable pure cotton or wool.

If we are asking a tree to participate in a healing ritual, strangling it with polyester feels a little dickish.

The tension between the ritual and the woodland became particularly obvious at Munlochy in 2022, when a large number of cloots were removed in what appears to have been an attempt to tidy the site. The removal upset people who saw those scraps not as rubbish but as prayers, illnesses, wishes and acts of hope left there deliberately. At the same time, inappropriate modern materials genuinely can damage the trees.

Both things can be true. A synthetic ribbon may be ecologically harmful and deeply meaningful to the person who tied it there. Preserving a living tradition therefore means preserving the part that mattered without allowing modern materials to overwhelm the place carrying it.

THE TRADITION NEVER REALLY STOPPED

This is not one of those rituals that survives only because an antiquarian wrote it down shortly before everyone abandoned it.

People still leave cloots.

Forestry and Land Scotland manage both Munlochy and St Mary's Well at Culloden as living cultural places rather than archaeological curiosities. When work has been carried out around the Culloden well, cloot-bearing branches have been treated carefully rather than simply cleared away, precisely because visitors continue to use the site for reflection and ritual.

The meaning has broadened as the practice has survived. One person may believe the water itself has healing power, another may understand the well through a saint or older ideas about sacred water, while somebody with no supernatural belief at all might still tie a piece of cloth for a person they love because the action means something.

That adaptability may be part of the reason the custom has lasted. It does not demand that everyone standing beside the same spring believes exactly the same thing.

They only need something they want to leave there.

I THINK I WOULD LEAVE ONE

Of everything we have looked at on this shelf, this may be the practice I understand most easily.

I would not expect a strip of cotton tied to a branch to cure somebody, but that is not really the part that gets me. It is taking something you cannot control and giving it an action.

You carry the cloth to the water, dip it in and think about whoever brought you there. Then you tie it among pieces left by people who came with their own illnesses, fears and hopes, and you go home without it.

After that, the weather takes over. You do not control how quickly the cloth fades, when it starts to fray or how long it takes to disappear, which feels appropriate because the situations that make people desperate for healing are usually the ones they cannot control either.

People have gone to Scottish wells for centuries with different religions, different explanations and probably very different levels of certainty. Saints were attached to some places, authorities tried to suppress others, individual rituals changed and modern visitors brought their own understanding to them.

The basic hope is much easier to recognise. Please let this get better. Then they tied the cloth to the tree and went home.