Monument record EXG 025 - St Wendred's Well; St Mildred's Well; Seven Springs

Marked on OS 1st edition map as 'St Mindred's Well', in an area known as the Seven Springs (S1). C19 directories of Exning say that St Etheldreda of Ely was baptised at the Seven Springs. The water is said to be good for ailments of the eyes (S10).

St Wendreda is an obscure Anglo-Saxon female saint who is claimed to have been born at Exning around AD 630. Presumably the foundress of a nunnery at March, Cambs, where a C14 church is dedicated to her. Her relics were removed to Ely in C10. Later, the story goes, these relics were carried into battle against Cnut at Ashingdon (1016), who captured them and later gave them to Canterbury (S8,S9).

`Called by some St Ethelred's, but by the inhabitants of the village, Minzin well', and adds that also at one time as St Mildred's Well (S2).

According to P May (The Exning Story) was originally St Mildred's Well (she was a cousin of St Ethelreda) - a lane leading to St Mildrede is mentioned in an Exning document of 1530. It appears to have continued to have been named as such until the C19 (in 1836) locally termed Minzin Well. OS maps from 1836 name it as St Mindred's Well until 1925 when it became St Wendred's Well.

Various (recent) claims for its early use for healing by St Wended though any documentary evidence for its early use as a holy well need checking!
There was a medieval chapel of St Mildred & associated hermitage in Exning (P Northeast, 'Medieval Chapels' in An Historical Atlas of Suffolk, 1999, 56-57). Hermit Philip de Cliston was recorded at chapel of St Mildred in 1389 (S5).

Said to have been a place of pigramage that was later overshadowed by the Walsingham Shrine (S4)
For royal and noble connections to Exning see (S3).

St. Wendred's Well is a natural spring in a low-lying marshy area within a wood. There is no trace of structures. (S6)