Saint Arnold's spring Tiegem

This source is located in the Sint-Arnoldus Park in Tiegem.

Saint Arnoldus, also called Saint Arnulfus, is attributed some miracles. Legend has it that St. Arnoldus was a bishop one day in Flanders, where the plague was raging. At a nearby brewery, he stirred the brew with his staff and proclaimed that whoever drank from it would be cured. And so it happened. He died in 1087.

In Tiegem, the veneration of Saint Arnold started in 1816 after the miraculous healing of Fransisca d'Hulst from Rollegem. With fractures in arm and foot, the blacksmith's daughter suddenly recovered when she used water from the then newly discovered Sint-Arnoldus source in the Holdenbroekbos, near the former knight's castle of the lords of Tiegem.

The following year it was the turn of the widow Van Der Schelden. The woman had an incurable disease of her senses. She sprinkled her eyes with the spring water and healed. After this one miracle followed another. And they all took place at that conscious source. Later this became the Sint-Arnoldus park.

Thanks to the generous generosity of a very wealthy merchant Vital Moreels, a chapel was built and solemnly consecrated in 1866 by the then bishop of Bruges.

It used to be the custom of the brewers to pour water from the source of Arnoldus in Tiegem into their first brew every year to ensure the success of the seasonal beer.

Willem Vandenameele