St Winifred was a seventh-century Welsh princess, sworn to a life of chastity, who was brought back to life by her uncle, St Beuno, after being decapitated by an angry suitor as she fled from him to take refuge in church. In the twelfth century her body was taken to Shrewsbury Abbey, where many pilgrims came to benefit from her healing miracles.

St Winifred was much loved in this area, so there is good reason to believe the tradition that this well at Woolston was dedicated to her; a lesser sister to the older and more famous St Winifred’s Well at Holywell in Flintshire.

Whether it is true or not, the well here has been venerated for centuries, and is still visited by pilgrims. The innermost of the three pools is the medieval well chamber. The little building above is the medieval well chapel, itself a miraculous survival, preserved since the Reformation as a Court House and then as a cottage. Meanwhile, the well itself was enlarged to form a cold bath (your own hot, more private bath is a stone’s throw from the cottage), first for a local squire, and later for the general public, whose conduct became so riotous that it was closed to them in 1755.

Thereafter it returned to nature, whose spirit was probably worshipped here long before Christianity. It is on the edge of a hamlet and hard to find (and rather harder to heat), approachable only by public footpath, which runs on, eventually, to a fragment of the old Shropshire Union Canal. Once here, acceptance of the miraculous is easy.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

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