Performing Pilgrimage to the Lourdes of Wales

This is the first scholarly study of Britain’s oldest pilgrimage site in continuous use, St Winefride’s Well. Since the martyrdom of its titular saint in the seventh century, pilgrims have flocked to the shrine in Holywell, north Wales, in search of healing and help in its icy waters. The shrine survived the ravages of the Reformation, and remained popular in an era when pilgrimage was suppressed; it exploded in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century, when stories of miraculous cures and mass pilgrimages filled the columns of national and international newspapers. By the 1890s, St Winefride’s Well was being called the Lourdes of Wales. This book charts centuries of changing pilgrimage practices to the well – from the journeys to reach it, to the actions of pilgrims in and around the water, and their post-pilgrimage lives – alongside accounts of how the shrine has been attacked, defended, restored and promoted over time.

This important study examines the unbroken history of pilgrimage at St Winefride’s Well over nine centuries, and provides new and timely insight into an aspect of pilgrimage often overlooked today. In telling Holywell’s
story, focusing particularly on its survival through the Early Modern period and its boom years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this extensively researched book brings to life the experiences of pilgrims across a period little associated with British pilgrimage. It is a valuable reminder that pilgrimage in the British Isles did not completely die out in the centuries following the Reformation, but was kept alive by the Catholic faithful in the small Welsh town that owes its name to its famous curative well.