You come up out of the car park on the A832 and into birch woodland, and within about thirty seconds the trees start to change. There is cloth on them. Then more cloth. Then the branches over your head are so thick with rags that the light coming through is coloured.

Some of it is bright and new. Most of it is grey, sodden, half-rotted, going back into the wood. There are children's clothes. There are, since 2020, a great many face masks.

This is the Munlochy Clootie Well on the Black Isle, and it is one of the most disquieting places in Scotland. Every rag is somebody's illness, left there to rot.

The practice

A cloot or clootie is Scots for a strip of cloth or a rag. A clootie well is a holy well or spring, almost always with a tree beside it, where visitors dip a piece of cloth in the water, touch it to the afflicted part of the body, and tie it to a branch.

The logic is sympathetic and it is beautifully direct: as the cloth rots, the illness fades. The healing is not instantaneous and it is not supposed to be. It happens at the speed of decomposition. You are handing your ailment over to time and to the weather, and the tree holds it while it comes apart.

That is one of the most patient pieces of magickal reasoning I know of, and it stands in complete opposition to how most modern practice is taught. Nothing about it is quick.

The other half of the tradition is a prohibition, and it is fierce: do not take a clootie. Whoever removes one takes on the illness or misfortune of the person who left it.

At Munlochy, pilgrims traditionally circled the well sunwise, deiseil (JESH-al), three times before making the offering. That is the same directional grammar that governs the fold of a petition paper and the turn of a house saining, and it turns up here without anyone having to be taught it.

The wells themselves

Wells and springs were sacred in these islands long before anyone wrote anything down. Water emerging from the ground is water arriving from somewhere else, and the pre-Christian reading is consistent across the Celtic-speaking world: a well is a gateway, a place where the Otherworld surfaces, inhabited by a spirit or deity of its own.

Christianity did not stamp this out. It absorbed it. Wells sacred to local spirits were rededicated to saints, and the pilgrimage continued with a new name attached.

Munlochy, in Scottish Gaelic Tobar Churadain (TOH-bur CHOO-ra-tin), is dedicated to St Curetán, also called Boniface, a Scoto-Pictish bishop active around 690 to 710 with his seat at Rosemarkie. His name is attached to a well that was almost certainly sacred long before he existed.

The Reformation was far less accommodating. In 1581 an Act of the Scottish Parliament made pilgrimage to holy wells illegal.

It did not work. When the Welsh traveller Thomas Pennant toured Scotland in 1769, nearly two centuries after the prohibition, he recorded holy wells tapestried with rags.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. The state banned it, the Kirk condemned it, and people kept walking up the glen with a bit of cloth in their pocket anyway. Not as resistance. Just because their mother had done it.

Other Scottish sites

  • St Mary's Well, Culloden Woods. A walled clootie well near the battlefield, traditionally visited on the first Sunday in May. Within living memory this was a genuine holiday with an ice cream van in the car park, though the custom is now in decline. In the summer of 1940 it was hung with rags during the loss of the 51st Highland Division at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux.
  • Craigie Well, Avoch, also on the Black Isle. Coins as well as clooties.
  • Kilallan, near Kilmacolm in Renfrewshire, now gone.

The tradition is not confined to Scotland. Cornwall has Madron, Alsia and Sancreed. Ireland has a great many, including Loughcrew.

The rag problem

I am going to be direct about this, because it is a live issue and because loving a tradition means being honest about what is happening to it.

The offerings are killing the trees.

A branch bound tightly with fabric is a branch that is being girdled. Multiply that by thousands. And the material has changed: what was once linen, wool or cotton, which rots, is now frequently polyester, nylon, acrylic, plastic bags, and at Munlochy the site has periodically had to be cleared of electrical items and, memorably, a venetian blind.

A synthetic clootie does not rot. Under the internal logic of the ritual, the illness therefore never fades. You have not left your ailment to decompose. You have hung it in a tree in perpetuity.

That is not a conservation argument dressed up in spiritual language. It is the ritual's own reasoning applied consistently.

Forestry and Land Scotland manage the Munlochy site, gave it a facelift in June 2025, and explicitly ask visitors to continue the tradition but to bring biodegradable cloth.

So: natural fibres only. Undyed or naturally dyed linen, cotton, wool, hemp. Nothing synthetic, nothing plastic, nothing with a metal fastening. Tie it loosely enough that the branch can grow. If you would not compost it, do not tie it to a tree.

Boundary water

Clootie wells are one expression of a much broader Scottish understanding of water, which is worth setting out because it governs a great deal of practice. Water is powerful where it is between.

  • The dead and living ford. Water for saining is drawn from a river crossing used both by the living going about their business and by funeral processions carrying the dead. The place is defined by who passes through it. It has been in contact with both states.
  • Boundary water. Water from the march between two parishes, two estates, two catchments.
  • Threshold hours. Water drawn before sunrise, at the turn of the tide, at the turn of the year.
  • Water that has not touched the ground. Dew gathered from grass at dawn on May morning, in one of the most persistent of all Scottish customs. Rainwater caught before it lands.
  • The surface itself. Still water for scrying, across effectively every human culture, because the surface is a boundary you can look at.

The common factor is not purity, and this is where a lot of modern practice goes wrong. It is not about clean water. It is about water that sits on a seam.

A great deal of Scottish water lore also carries the instruction to fetch it in silence, speaking to nobody on the way out or the way back. I keep that. It costs nothing and it changes the walk entirely.

If you go

  • Bring your own cloth, natural fibre, and bring it deliberately. Do not tear a strip off something on the way.
  • Dip it in the water. Touch it where it hurts. Say what it is for. Out loud, quietly.
  • Tie it loosely. Sunwise round the branch, three turns.
  • Take nothing. Not a rag, not a coin, not a stone from the well. Nothing.
  • Do not photograph the offerings close up. Every one of those is somebody's illness or somebody's dead child. I would not want mine on the internet.

And walk out the way you came, without hurrying.

Sources

  • Munlochy Clootie Well — Forestry and Land Scotland, the managing body, including the request for biodegradable offerings.
  • The Clootie Well — Undiscovered Scotland, on St Curetán and the sunwise circuit.
  • Clootie well — Wikipedia, for St Mary's Well at Culloden, Craigie Well, Kilallan, and the non-biodegradable clearance problem.
  • Clootie Wells: Where the Trees Are Weighed Down in Rotting Rags — Atlas Obscura, including the 1940 Saint-Valéry-en-Caux episode.
  • Henderson, L. & Cowan, E. J. (2001). Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press. On rags, hair and coins as charms, penances and vow-tokens.
  • Pennant, T. (1771, 1774). A Tour in Scotland. Available via Internet Archive.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text — for dew, May morning water and the silence instruction.
  • Canmore — Historic Environment Scotland's national record, searchable for holy wells by parish.
  • Morris, R. & Morris, F. (1982). Scottish Healing Wells. Alethea Press.

Related: [Saining: The Scottish Art of Cleansing by Water and Smoke]; [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]; [Liminal Plants]