The Parish that Found its Past
Poundstock Gildhouse, Church and Holy Well
with Terry Faull
For several hundred years the ancient parish of St Winwaloe was called St Neot’s. When, after the council of Whitby, the Romanised church sought to assume its authority over the indigenous religion of what we now call Britain, one of the vehicles of the insidious invasion was the replacement of the reverence for the venerable ancestors of the old tradition with more acceptable and less controversial doyens of the new. The Celtic Christians had other ideas - and while their views and their customs were be physically suppressed, they proved tenacious in their dedication to their own heritage. While St Winwaloe was airbrushed out of the formal records of the Poundstock area, he never quite disappeared - and, perhaps fittingly in a more enlightened age, he has quite recently been restored as the patron saint of the parish.
