The BBC will tonight screen the first of three hour-long episodes of its series Pilgrimage following seven celebrity pilgrims, of differing faiths and beliefs, on a spiritual journey across North Wales.
The sixth series of the BBC2 programme takes the well-known personalities along the North Wales Pilgrim’s Way.
The route celebrates Celtic early Christian saints, and concludes at Bardsey Island, or Ynys Enlli, Snowdonia’s “Isle of 20,000 saints” situated off the western tip of the Llyn Peninsula.
The series features the Catholic National Shrine at Holywell where Bishop Peter Brignall, Bishop of Wrexham, was filmed for a segment.
Bishop Brignall said: “Within hours of beginning their pilgrimage the celebrity pilgrims came to their first station, Saint Winefride’s Shrine and Well discovering the story of Saint Winefride and the reality of her life and faith.
“Inspired, enthused and invigorated they set off from Holywell across North Wales to the extreme westly point of Bardsey Island.”
Bishop Brignall believes this early stop on the route helped the celebrities prepare for the pilgrim journey ahead:
“For many the National Shrine of Saint Winefride’s is a pilgrimage destination, coming in faith to give thanks, praise and glory to God; for others to discover and seek restoration, healing and renewal.
“For these celebrities it was an immersion – a baptism even – into the pilgrim life they were about to lead.
“This, in microcosm, is life’s journey; a journeying together providing strength and support, delighting in the companionship of sharing discoveries and joys, sharing sorrows and weaknesses.”
The celebrity pilgrims embarked on a two-week, 220km adventure from Flint Castle on the bank of the Dee Estuary, across the foothills of incredible mountain ranges, and taking on England and Wales’ highest peak Yr Wyddfa, or Mount Snowdon.
Television presenter Michaela Strachan, who places her faith in the natural world; Spencer Matthews, a former reality TV star turned entrepreneur, who was christened Church of England but is still searching for answers to life’s big questions; Sonali Shah, a journalist and TV presenter who was raised in a Jain household; comedian Eshaan Akbar, a lapsed Muslim; Amanda Lovett, a practising Catholic, who catapulted to public attention in the first series of BBC’s The Traitors; actor Tom Rosenthal, star of Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner, who calls himself ‘areligious’; and TV personality and former model, Christine McGuinness, who is “spiritual”.
The bishops of England and Wales last year elevated St Winefride’s Well to the status of a national shrine.
The shrine in Flintshire has been a site of pilgrimage for almost 1,400 years since St Winefride was decapitated there by Caradog, a spurned suitor, and miraculously re-headed by her uncle, St Beuno.
St Winefride’s inspired King Henry V, who made a pilgrimage to the shrine, and also novelists like Ellis Peters, the author of the Cadfael detective series, and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian Jesuit.
The shrine also features in the 2022 crime thriller, The Beast of Bethulia Park, by Catholic Herald associate editor Simon Caldwell
St Winefride is one of the few Welsh saints to be honoured as a virgin-martyr in Roman martyrology and, according to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, has always been “venerated outside her own country more than any other of the numerous Welsh saints”.
She was buried at Gwytherin by St Eleri but her remains were moved to Shrewsbury, some 50 years after the abbey was founded, by Robert Pennant, the fifth abbot.
A fictionalised account of this translation of the relics appears in the first of Ellis Peters’s 20 novels about Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine sleuth.
This spring attached to her legend has given its name to Holywell and down the centuries, and right up to the present day, pilgrims have travelled there in the hope of finding healing for their illnesses. It is celebrated almost as the “Lourdes of Wales” and pilgrimages and healings have continued uninterrupted at Holywell for more than 1,000 years.
Pilgrims have included King Richard I, the “Lionheart”, who offered prayers for the success of his Crusade; King Henry V, who, according to Adam of Usk, made a pilgrimage on foot from Shrewsbury to Holywell for thanksgiving for his victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, at which he put himself under the protection of St Winefride, and to atone for the slaughter that followed the battle, and King James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, who prayed for an heir when they visited the Well.
Pilgrimages to the well even continued throughout the Reformation. In 1593, the esteemed Jesuit missionary Father John Gerard made a pilgrimage there on St Winefride’s feast day, which is celebrated on November 3, and the well was also visited by martyrs St Nicholas Owen and by Blessed Edward Oldcorne, who died with the name “St Winefride” on his lips.
Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins went to bathe in the waters of the well on Boxing Day of 1879.
He later wrote the poem St Winefride’s Well in honour of the saint, putting a prediction into the mouth of St Beuno that her name will live, that the spring would become a place of pilgrimage, and that the well will always be a place of healing.
BBC Two broadcasts the first part of ‘Pilgrimage: The Road Through North Wales’ on Good Friday, 29 March, at 9pm. You can also catch-up, on-demand via BBC iPlayer.
(Photo, courtesy of the BBC, shows from left to right: Tom Rosenthal, Amanda Lovett, Christine McGuinness, Bishop Peter Brignall, Spencer Matthews, Sonali Shah, Eshaan Akbar, and Michaela Strachan.)
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