Almedha

Saint Almedha (Eluned, Aled, Elevetha) was a Welsh virgin of the fifth or sixth century, one of the daughters of King Brychan of Brycheiniog (Breconshire). Tradition says that she suffered martyrdom on a hill near Brecon. George Phillips calls her "the Luned of the Mabinogion and the Lynette of Tennyson".

A Christian from a young age, she spurned the advances of a pagan prince and ran away to avoid being forced into marriage. She travelled first to Llan Ddew, where she was ousted by the locals, then to Llanfilo, where the same happened. At the end of her flight she was put to death. Her remains, says a fifteenth-⁠century source, were housed in the priory church at Usk, home to a community of Benedictine nuns. At Slwch near Brecon, her well was associated with healing in Norman times, and her chapel and well were destroyed at the Reformation; in 1698 the chapel still stood, unroofed, on a site with an aged yew tree and a well at its foot. Her feast day is 1 August, the same day as a pagan harvest festival. She is commemorated on 1 August as a saint of the undivided Church, by the New Calendar.