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...watery places were likely to have held continuing spiritual significance to both the nuns and pilgrims, she said.

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What? We are not talking about pagans here. Why would she say this? Did she mean to say that such places had practical significance for the nuns?

There are a lot of holy wells in Ireland, Wales, and Britain, many of them associated with saints who were famed for causing the water to spring up in that place, or for healing people with the waters.

This custom may be related to Biblical piety. In the Holy Land you can find a shrine over the spring that issued from the staff of Moses and the Well of Beersheba, and, if I remember correctly, Moses’ well near Mount Nebo. The Jordan was also associated with miracles, such as the healing of Naaman the Syrian, who had leprosy.

Reformation-supporting governments destroyed wells and springs associated with Catholic saints, including the most famous one in Britain, the Holy Spring of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Modern historians are increasingly questioning the Reformation assumption that these were originally pagan wells. There's a book from around 20 years ago called "The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles" which debunks the idea that these were taken over from the Druids and so forth.

Oddly enough, just as modern historians and archaeologists are to some extent disproving that these wells were sites of Druid rituals, modern-day pagans are claiming them. But they are so bogus: they have no historic connection with pre-Christian paganism, and remarkably little interest in actual history as opposed to fabricated-from-whole-cloth fantasy.

I'm no expert, but that's as much as I (think I) know.

So yeah, they may have had miraculous wells or healing springs associated with the convent.