Walsingham Abbey

Lourdes, Fátima, Guadalupe, Knock. There are many sites that are sacred to Christians for alleged visions of the Virgin Mary. One of the oldest sites with that distinction is in the tiny North Norfolk village of Walsingham.

The story goes back to 1061, five years before the Norman invasion of England. English noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches claimed to have had three Marian visions, during which she was shown the house of the Annunciation, the building in Nazareth where Christians believe Jesus was conceived. Mary apparently instructed her to build a replica of the house in Walsingham.

At the time of construction, the Holy Land was essentially off-limits to Christians as a result of Islamic control, and later, the instability of the Crusades. This made the holy house of Walsingham a major pilgrimage site in Europe. The priory was built on the site, and the village expanded to provide for the huge number of visitors. These visitors included King Henry III, who made his first pilgrimage in 1226. Following his example, almost every other monarch over the next 300 years also visited the abbey.

During the English Reformation, the priory and holy house were destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII, who himself had visited on a pilgrimage in 1513. This ended pilgrimages for nearly 400 years, and the village re-invented itself as a market town. In the late nineteenth century, the village began to rediscover its history, and the first pilgrims returned in 1897.

Walsingham regained its status as a major site of Christian pilgrimage in the 20th century, with Pope Pius XII granting a canonical coronation to the statue of the Virgin Mary, now on display in the Basilica of Our Lady of Walsingham. The village also houses several Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox shrines, and is visited by an estimated 300,000 pilgrims annually, most of whom still visit the site of the original holy house, in the ruins of the priory.