Explore the history of an ancient site of pilgrimage: the healing waters of the Lourdes of Wales.

This is the first scholarly study of one of Britain’s oldest pilgrimage sites: 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 and exploded in popularity in 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, it was called the Lourdes of Wales. Performing Pilgrimageto the Lourdes of Wales 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, as well as how the shrine has been attacked, defended, restored, and promoted.