Notable Landmarks · Holywell, Flintshire
St Winefride's Well
The 'Lourdes of Wales' — a holy well whose origin legend is a tale of thwarted lust; pilgrims still bathe in the star-shaped basin for healing and intercession.
The place
Holy well and national shrine, a place of continuous pilgrimage for ~1,300 years. Origin legend: the martyr Winefride was decapitated by a lustful suitor, Caradoc, and restored to life by St Beuno, the spring rising where her head fell. Grade I listed, Scheduled Monument.
Sources
Nearby on the map
Two upper-class Irish women who eloped in 1778 to set up home together, scandalising and enthralling Georgian society; their Gothic cottage drew Wordsworth, Byron, Wellington and Walter Scott, and Queen Charlotte won them a royal pension. A cornerstone of British queer heritage — Anne Lister herself visited.
Documented historyHot spotBohemian & LibertinePortmeirion (Noël Coward writes Blithe Spirit)Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd · WalesClough Williams-Ellis's Italianate folly-village on a Welsh estuary — a place built purely for pleasure — where Noël Coward, taking rooms in 1941, wrote 'Blithe Spirit' in five days. The village's flamboyant unreality has drawn the theatrical, the artistic and the amorous ever since.
Documented historyLiterary PassionDove Cottage (the Wordsworths at Grasmere)Grasmere, Cumbria · EnglandThe tiny lakeland cottage of William, his adored sister Dorothy — whose journals record wearing his wedding ring the night before he married — and his bride Mary. The intensity of the brother-sister bond has fascinated and divided scholars ever since; the documented record is devotion, and this entry claims nothing more.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.