Talk:St Winefride's Well

Milwr tunnel

Should probably mention that the Milwr tunnel stopped it from flowing for a while if anyone can find a ref.©Geni 01:55, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Post-expansion notes

In my expansion of the article, I removed some of the existing content, and I want to explain for the record why I did so. The parts I removed are as follows:

• St Winefride's well is believed to be connected to St Mary's well and chapel in Cefn Meiriadog, Denbighshire. This was unsourced, and a quick online search turned up this blog source, which says the two wells are no longer believed to be connected.
• It is one of the few locations mentioned by name in the anonymous medieval alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This was unsourced. The poem mentions "Holy Hede", and there is speculation that this might be a reference to Holywell (see e.g. [1]), but it's not certain, and the poem doesn't mention the well specifically.
• King Henry VIII caused the shrine and saintly relics to be destroyed, but some have been recovered to be housed at Shrewsbury and Holywell. I think there's some confusion here with Henry's destruction of the Shrewsbury shrine, because he certainly never destroyed the shrine at Holywell.
• Princess Victoria, staying in Holywell with her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium, visited the Well in 1828. This was sourced to the well's official website. I found the claim in a few other places online but not in any reliable sources. If it's true, there may still be a problem with WP:PROPORTION; if scholarly sources about the well don't mention the visit, it probably isn't important enough to include in the article.
• The stonework of the chapel is covered with hundreds of graffiti, the initials of grateful pilgrims. Some inscriptions testify to cures received there. This is true but I couldn't find a source for it. Graffiti is very briefly mentioned in the Scheduled Monuments listing, but that's the best I've got. This could be restored if better sourcing is found.
• Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester, visited the well in 2005. In July 2021 Charles, Prince of Wales visited the well. This was sourced to the official website and some contemporary news reports. Again, the problem is WP:PROPORTION. If scholars writing about the well don't mention this, then we shouldn't either.
• During early 2019 the water flow of the spring was interrupted due to repair work. I couldn't find a source for this, even looking through local newspaper archives. It's probably true, but it seems like trivia regardless. If the flow had been interrupted for any significant length of time, I think it would have been widely reported.

I've also moved Richard I into a footnote, for the reasons explained in that note. If there's any disagreement about the above, I'm happy to discuss.

I also want to note a couple of ideas for further expansion:

• The "Miracles" section is pretty short, just because reading through miracle stories doesn't really interest me. If anyone's interested in expanding this, the primary sources in that section would be a good starting point. There's some secondary coverage in Champ 1982, pp. 156–157; Seguin 2003, pp. 4–5; Scully 2007, pp. 212–213; and Pritchard 2019, pp. 25–29, 325–334, 374–379. An interesting angle would be the punitive miracles, the bad things that happen to sinners and sceptics. This section could also discuss in more detail the rational explanations given by non-Catholics (minerals in the water, the shock of the cold, placebo effect, etc.), and the Catholic rebuttals. And there's some minor miracles that I haven't mentioned in the article, like the water changing colour on Winefride's feast day (see e.g. John Gerard's autobiography quoted in Scully).
• G. Hartwell Jones says in a footnote that there are stones in the Greenfield valley that are survivals of ancient pilgrimage stations. I couldn't find any more information on this.
• Turner 2019 has a lot of information about the carvings, bosses and heraldic badges in the chapel. Someone who knows about these things could add a paragraph or two about this to the article.
• According to Rees 2012, the upper chapel is owned by the Representative Body of the Church in Wales, while the well crypt is owned by Flintshire County Council and leased to the Roman Catholic Church. But the staff at the site told me something different, so the situation may have changed. I've omitted the question of ownership from the article until I get some clarification on this.

I've made digital copies of most of my offline sources, so I can provide extracts if anybody wants them.

One last note: some sources say that James II visited the well in 1686, not 1687. I think this error derives from a typo in G. Jones p. 408, where he gives the wrong date in the main text and the correct date in a footnote. The exact date is known from primary documents (27 August 1687; see Pritchard p. 194), and besides, everyone agrees that James visited the well the year before the birth of his first son in 1688.

—Sojourner in the earth (talk) 21:55, 24 October 2023 (UTC)