Stories in Stone

The Welsh Government’s historic environment service, Cadw, looks after 129 of Wales’s historic sites. Here, Cadw’s former Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Dr Sian Rees, explores the intricate and beautiful architecture of St Winefride’s Holy Well in north Wales, and the clues it gives us to the site’s rich history – from the martyrdom of St Winefride in the seventh century to the well’s fame as a medieval pilgrimage site.

Inside the chapel at St Winefride’s Well there is a wealth of history to be found simply by looking up. There, partly hidden in the shadows, is a huge carved stone hanging delicately by a coronet of carved angels from the centre of the vaulted roof.

Although difficult to discern with the naked eye, this pendant depicts six scenes from the life of St Winefride.

It is this superb craftmanship which helps make the late medieval well and chapel at Holywell one of the architectural glories of Wales. Built over a natural well where ‘the spring boils with vast impetuosity out of a rock’, as Thomas Pennant described it in 1773, it is revered as the place where St Winefride was beheaded before being restored to life by her uncle, Beuno, and has been a focus of pilgrimage for centuries.

St Winefride was celebrated as a local saint from early times but interest grew after the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, where the saint’s intervention was believed to have saved the life of Prince Henry (later Henry V). Her cult became intertwined with that of the Virgin Mary and became popular with the wealthy aristocracy of north-west Wales.

Medieval pilgrimage was a carefully choreographed event. Immersion in the bathing pool was the focal point for pilgrims who would have travelled from Basingwerk Abbey, up the hill to St Beuno’s church to prepare themselves with prayer. From the gallery, they would have processed down the steps into the shimmering water in the basin and emerged to circle the surrounding walkway clockwise. This was repeated three times before the pilgrim knelt before the statue to pray. The final act of piety was to kneel on St Beuno’s stone in the outer pool. At a booth, pilgrims would make their offerings and obtain their indulgences promising remission from days in Purgatory and their pilgrim’s badge.

The architecture of the building helped in the sense of awe and occasion. The ornate eight-sided star-shaped well basin is encased by a delicate cage of masonry on which the entrancing reflections of the moving water would have played.

However, over the years the architectural details had become obscured. The well had suffered from damp because it is built into the hillside. This, coupled with the humid, polluted atmosphere in the vault from well water, plus smoke from the candles of generations of pilgrims had led to surface damage of the walls including salt efflorescence and staining.
In 2010 Cadw took over the care of the well and set about cleaning and conserving the building. As a result we were able to reveal again the astonishing series of sculptures high in the roof.

We found religious images and angels, badges and emblems of the Royal and Beaufort families - including Katherine of Aragon - grotesques, animals, Green Men and foliage. We revealed the Legs of Man, which are the emblem of the Stanley family, and we might even have found a portrait of Lord Stanley and his wife, Margaret Beaufort. Lady Margaret was the mother of Henry VII by an earlier marriage to Edmund Tudor – son of Welshman Owen Tudor and effectively the founder of the Tudor dynasty. A sixteenth-century Welsh poem and recent tree-ring dating of the roof timbers of the Well Chapel, show that it was built by Abbot Thomas Pennant between 1512-26, perhaps in celebration of the Tudors and the Stanleys and their achievements.

Some sculptures are more easily understood - the face of a man carrying a disabled pilgrim on his back looks down on you as you enter the building, while above this entrance are statues of Winefride and Beuno. Above the niche, which originally held a statue of the Virgin Mary, is a Coronation of the Virgin, and the exterior of the building is encircled by charming friezes of running animals.

Not only has our work helped conserve the fragile stonework but our detailed photographs and drawings have helped us to draw reconstructions of how the building might have appeared when first built with its elaborate tracery complete.

And, using state-of-the-art laser recording of the central pendant, we have created a digital model to show visitors the intricacy and quality of the sculpture. By revealing again the story of St Winefride, as well as the other architectural gems, we hope that 21st-century visitors and pilgrims will be able to reflect on what this special place means to them and to Wales.

For this and other news about Welsh heritage visit www.cadw.wales.gov.uk