Monday 30 December 2013

Full circle in 2013


A new BBC Two series on sacred sites has just been launched, ending a year in which holy places have enjoyed a relatively high profile on the television.

Sacred Wonders of Britain, presented by archaeologist Neil Oliver, takes a historian's perspective on the subject as one might imagine. The programme was shown on BBC Two at 8.30pm on 30 December, and is available on iPlayer for a few weeks.

Neil Oliver was certainly in his element in the first episode, which looked at Stone Age sites from across the country. Avebury, Stonehenge and Orkney's stone circles are familiar territory, icons of a mysterious past that fascinates us as much as it continues to puzzle.

Undoubtedly the greatest problem with describing the rituals, traditions and beliefs of our ancient ancestors is that we have almost no idea what these were. The first scraps of written information about Britain come from the Romans, several thousand years after many of our most evocative ancient sites were built. Neil Oliver tried a number of theories during his grand tour. A few touched on some of the eternal questions that religions try to answer, passing references that were more thought provoking than informative (review in the Daily Mirror).

Neo-pagans have made attempts in recent years to recreate or reinvent some of these beliefs, and with such a tempting and largely blank canvas to fill the creative process seems set to continue. One of the advisers to the programme is Professor Ronald Hutton, an expert and adherent of this revival movement.

Quite what Neil Oliver will make of Britain's Christian heritage in the remaining two programmes remains to be seen. It is possible the three-part series is only going to address our most recent 2,000 years of spiritual history in a single episode, and terminate the narrative at the Reformation. It is an alternative view to treat our country's many great religions as a sort of spiritual fossil, lifeless artefacts from an unfamiliar past. Our own series on Britain's Holiest Places stressed a continuity of use that is just as accessible and relevant today as it was to previous generations. Archaeologists perhaps feel most comfortable among the dead, but to my mind any truly holy place remains very much a place for the living.

Saturday 7 December 2013

Back after centuries of neglect


It has come racing back to life after aeons of neglect, delighting the faithful and drawing thousands of website hits… Alas I'm not talking about this blog - though it has indeed been shamefully neglected this autumn - but rather a spectacular medieval wall painting which is in the news this week after its breath-taking rediscovery at a church in Glamorgan.

The church is St Cadog's in the little village of Llancarfan, south Wales. I wrote about it in my book on Britain's holy places, even though the restoration work had only been fragmentary at the time of my visit in August 2010, revealing a few faces and a queen with a lamb on a leash. The painstaking cleaning work has revealed the largest known mural of the life of St George to be found anywhere in Britain, and restorers have recently removed the scaffolding to allow visitors a proper look.

It might make me sounds like a nerd, but I have to admit I did often wonder about what more was lying hidden under centuries of whitewash in this seemingly modest little church, with its short tower and sparse parish. The BBC News item linked above offers a long look at the central figure of St George on his horse attacking the mythical dragon, something that was impossible to make out when I visited from the scattered patches of brushstrokes that had then been revealed.

Some tales and some places linger in the memory. The rediscovery of such a vast work of forgotten devotional art in the past five years is without recent precedent. It was only the presence of a thin red line of paint high up on the wall that alerted the experts to the existence of this magnificent and extensive treasury of medieval art.

It is an irony perhaps that St George is likely to be one of the least popular subjects to adorn the walls of a Welsh church, given his close identification with the English monarchy, and in particular with the knights of the realm. And yet there he sits on a magnificent horse, shown in lingering detail on the BBC News piece.

We considered visiting this little church for a follow-up television series to our BBC Four series Pagans & Pilgrims. It is a building that vividly demonstrates the interplay of patriotism and religion in the medieval mind, and also possibly the finest Welsh wall paintings yet to be uncovered in any church.

So far our second series has not been commissioned, despite the success of the original. Even so BBC Four seems to have picked up a habit of making programmes about holy places and our country's amazing religious heritage, with two other series also broadcast this autumn: Cathedrals, which looked at the inspiring people who work at my own mother church in Southwark, and Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve, a new series which seems to be showing a spiritual journey from the point of view of a benevolent but disengaged non-believer. Something for everyone there perhaps.