06/01/2026
In Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset, the shrine of St Wite holds her relics, which survived the Reformation. Though she does not have an officially recognised feast, she is venerated locally with a feast on
June 1, and a pilgrimage route. 🙏
By Sam Linley, May 31, 2026 – EWTN Great Britain
In a quiet corner of the Dorset countryside, in the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum, there is a medieval shrine that contains something found nowhere else in England outside Westminster Abbey: the original relics of a saint, undisturbed for over a thousand years. The bones belong to St Wite, St Candida in Latin, and almost everything about her is a mystery.
We do not know when she lived. We do not know her precise name. What we do know is that she has been venerated on this spot since at least the ninth century, and that her shrine survived the Reformation when virtually every other shrine in England was destroyed.
The most enduring tradition holds that she was an Anglo-Saxon holy woman, a hermit who lived along the Dorset cliffs and maintained fires on the headlands to guide sailors. She is said to have been martyred in 831 during a Danish raid. There is even a crude carving on the church’s exterior that may depict a Viking longship. Some scholars connect her with St Gwen Teirbron, a Breton holy woman whose name, like Wite, Candida, means simply ‘white’ in her own tongue, and whose relics may have been carried to Dorset by refugees fleeing Viking invasion. But St Wite is honoured in the old martyrologies as a virgin martyr, while St Gwen was a mother of several children and died peacefully. In the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, it is written that she was most probably ‘a West Saxon woman of whom all other records have perished.’
The church itself dates to the reign of Alfred the Great, who bequeathed the estate of Hwitancircian to his youngest son in 881. It grew substantially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the shrine’s reputation for healing drew pilgrims from across the country. The shrine in the north transept is plain: a stone base, a marble lid, three oval openings cut into the lower section. Through these ‘limb holes’, medieval pilgrims would insert diseased hands or the personal belongings of those too ill to make the journey, trusting in St Wite’s intercession. St Thomas More recorded a local custom of offering her cakes and cheese on her feast day.
When Henry VIII’s commissioners began dismantling England’s shrines, destroying St Thomas Becket’s at Canterbury and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, this quiet tomb in Dorset was left untouched. How it survived is not entirely clear. Its plain design may have led to it being mistaken for an ordinary burial. Whatever the reason, the concealment was so complete that the saint’s very identity was forgotten. Then, in 1900, a crack appeared in the stonework. When repairs were undertaken, the shrine, long assumed to be empty, was opened. Inside was a lead casket inscribed in twelfth-century lettering: ‘Hic reqesct reliqe Sce Wite’ — Here rest the relics of St Wite. Within lay the bones of a small woman, aged around forty, who appeared to have led an ascetic life. They were placed back inside, and the shrine resealed.
St Wite does not appear in the Catholic National Calendar for England and Wales. She has no official feast day and no optional memorial. The Church’s calendar requires a degree of historical certainty that her story cannot quite provide. But she is remembered locally, with her feast falling on 1 June; her cross appearing on the Dorset county flag; and a guided pilgrimage route, St Wite’s Way, now brings pilgrims to her shrine each year. A mile south, on the National Trust’s Golden Cap estate, her holy well still flows, associated since at least the seventeenth century with healing of the eyes.
Paper prayers and photographs now fill the limb holes where diseased hands once reached. The practice has not stopped. It has simply continued, quietly, as it has for twelve centuries. We commend ourselves to St Wite’s intercession and ask for her prayers.
