Reviving tradition

Poet and wanderer Emily Oldfield reflects on the return of well dressing, and feeling a part of lost traditions

It has been speculated that well dressing began as a pagan custom of offering thanks to gods for a reliable water supply

On a bus bouncing across the moors from Whaley Bridge to Glossop, I fumble with my phone and attempt to message my friend Becky, who has been asking about our upcoming plans to go to the well dressing at Saddleworth.

Impatient rain drums against the window and a fusty tang rises from all the damp anoraks. It’s not long before I find myself too distracted and nauseous to text. I resort to sending a GIF instead. A quick search for ‘well dressing’ brings up an uncanny series of animations largely focused on fashion, so I pick the one with wavering text declaring ‘Depressed but well dressed’ and leave it at that.

Pressing the side of my cheek to the clammy-cold of the bus window, I wonder if I’m depressed. I’m certainly not ‘well dressed’. But I don’t think ‘depression’, the term attributed to me at various points in my life, quite cuts it. The bus trembles at a second series of temporary traffic lights in a way that makes my face ache.

It feels like my brain isn’t working like it used to. Just under a year ago I moved to Derbyshire from the Lancashire-Yorkshire borderlands where I was born and grew up – a move that was unwanted but felt necessary due to some very difficult circumstances. Circumstances aside, the South Pennines seemed to give my writing its rhythm and feeling, the plunging valleys and the gritstone, all-encompassing and intimate. I recognise that I was lucky to feel from a place, part of a place.