The water at St Winefride's Well gathers in a star-shaped stone basin, and above it a carved pendant boss shows six scenes from the saint's life set among Tudor family symbols. The chapel built over the crypt was finished around 1520 in Perpendicular Gothic sandstone, and it has been a place of pilgrimage for more than 1,300 years — by most accounts the oldest continuously visited pilgrimage site in Britain, and the only one to keep going straight through the Reformation. Richard II came in 1398, Henry IV in 1403, and James II in 1687, the last of them leaving £30 for repairs. It is sometimes called the Lourdes of Wales, and in November 2023 it was made a national shrine.
The town takes its name from all this water. Treffynnon means well-town, and the whole place turns on springs from the mountains above, which feed the well and once powered the valley below. Holywell sits on a hillside over the west side of the Dee estuary, the ground falling steeply to the sea, and splits into four areas: Pen-y-Maes, the Strand, the Holway, and the town centre.
For a drink and a meal, the Glan yr Afon Inn at Dolphin opened in 1559 and has been serving for over 450 years. It once held a place in the Guinness Book of Records for being owned by the same family for four hundred of them. Two menus run from bar snacks to Italian chicken and steak and ale pie, with traditional Sunday lunches, a beer garden and real ales. Dogs are taken seriously here — a supply of biscuits is kept behind the bar and handed out free to any that walk in. The inn sits directly above the Milwr Tunnel, ten miles of drainage bored from 1897 to keep the lead mines of Halkyn Mountain dry.
There are more pubs within a short drive: the Fox Inn at Ysceifiog for local cask ales, the family-owned Druid Inn at Gorsedd, and the Red Lion, a converted farmhouse with low beams and an inglenook fireplace, doing homemade food. On the High Street, a street market runs every Thursday, Danny's Family Butchers has been trading for more than twenty years, and Marmalade does coffee. The fish and chip shop has been going over a hundred years and holds a five-star hygiene rating.
The walking starts from the High Street. The Town Trail leads down through Greenfield Valley to the coast, past ruined mills and reservoirs following the course of the Holywell Stream. The valley holds seven scheduled monuments in a mile and a half — the only such concentration in Wales — including the ruins of Basingwerk Abbey, a Cistercian house founded around 1132 and dissolved in 1536. The 70-acre Heritage Park has a museum farm, a fishing pool and what is reckoned the best free children's playground in the region. Flint and its station are five miles off; Mold is nine.
Gerard Manley Hopkins first saw the well in October 1874 and never got over it. He described the water as "clear as glass, greenish like beryl or aquamarine, trembling at the surface with the force of the springs."