ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the production of the shrine and the translation of the relics were more or less contemporary, and suggests that the shrine was big enough to have held the saint's skull and disarticulated bones. Hitherto believed to be of either AngloSaxon or Welsh origin and of 8th-century date or 9th-century date, the shrine is attributed to the early 12th-century Irish school which produced St Manchan's shrine and the Cross of Cong. The shrine of St Gwenfrewi from Gwytherin, Denbighshire, is known from a late 17th-century illustration and from some surviving fragments of wood. St Kappel Gwenfrewi's shrine, a container made of wooden boards with metal mounts, was formerly preserved at Gwytherin and was drawn in the 1690s by Edward Lhuyd. The Lhuyd illustration shows one face and one end of a tent-shaped shrine of triangular section comparable with the 12th-century Irish shrine of St Manchan from Lemanaghan, Co Offaly.
