Tegla is a shadowy saint, sometimes identified with the Thecla of early Christian legend, and the village of Llandegla takes its name from her church. Below the church, in a field by the stream, is her well, and for centuries it drew people with one particular affliction: the falling sickness, epilepsy, which in Welsh was called clwyf Tegla, Tegla's disease.
The cure involved a bird. Elias Owen, summarising older descriptions, wrote that a male patient brought a cock to offer to the saint and a female patient a hen. The same custom was followed at St Deifer's well at Bodfari further north in the Vale of Clwyd. Owen, a clergyman with a classical education, could not help pointing out the parallel with Socrates, whose last words asked his friend Crito to pay the cock he owed to Asclepius, the god of healing.
The fuller accounts, going back to Thomas Pennant in the late 18th century, describe a longer ritual: washing in the well, dropping in coins, walking round it and round the church while saying prayers, pricking the bird with pins and carrying it in a basket, and spending the night lying under the communion table in the church. In the morning the bird was left behind, and if it died the illness was believed to have passed into it. By Owen's time these customs had faded, and he wrote of them as things of the past.
The well can still be found in the field below the church.
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