Holy places now starring in six-part TV series

BBC Four and S4C have teamed up to produce a visually stunning six-part TV series based on Britain's Holiest Places, my book published in 2011. It will show our extraordinary Christian landscape in a completely new light, a surprising heritage of mixed devotional activity handed down over the past 2,000 years. The first episode goes out during the week starting 9 March.

The series includes contributions from some of the country's best-known church figureheads, including Archbishop Vincent Nichols, talking about shrines, and Dean Jeffrey John, introducing the story of Britain's first martyr St Alban. A rather less newsworthy contribution sees me showing the series presenter Ifor ap Glyn round an ancient sacred pool lost in the Northumberland countryside, and discussing the eye-catching Roman-era baptismal ritual that may have been practised there. Ifor and I are pictured above at Whitby Abbey.

I was signed up to work on the whole series, so we have spent the past few months with the team tearing across the country to film 38 of the most intriguing and appealing holy sites. We were blessed by good weather at several of the most dramatic landscape settings, defying some record-breaking downpours and snowstorms along the way. Combined with much aerial footage, the series should give anyone something to marvel at and think over at the same time.

The BBC series will be called Britain's Holiest Places, no less, and all the main sites feature in my book. It has been divided up into six episodes and I will aim to write here about each one as it comes on screen each week. A Welsh-language version produced by S4C was broadcast from mid January onwards, Llefydd Sanctaidd.

The episodes are mostly shaped around the natural world, explaining how devotion was written across the landscape itself, a powerful and thought-provoking fusion of the worldly and the divine. For example we examine how Britain's many holy islands were a convenient place to build a hermitage or a monastery and yet developed deeper into a metaphor for the journey from this world to the next.

In this vein, the six episodes will look in turn at:

• Ruins
• Islands
• Water rituals
• Caves and crypts
• Trees and mountains
• Shrines

As in my book, most of the sites arise from our long and productive Christian past. But a few are based on even older holy places, such as the mysterious ruined church built at the heart of a huge Iron Age henge at Knowlton in Dorset - a site where both pagan and Christian ritual have been and gone, as we discuss with expert author Philip Carr-Gomm. And we even had access to a peaceful Buddhist community living on an island made holy by a 7th century Christian hermit off the coast of Scotland.

We meet nuns, priests, bishops, deans, authors, critics and artists in our journey to unravel the complex emotions that lie sleeping beneath our feet. So many eye-catching locations... it was a huge joy for me to lead the film crew down overgrown paths or up windswept hills and find that at every single site they found as much to marvel at as I did during my solitary wanderings.

My book began as a labour of love, and I was delighted to see the presenter Ifor develop his own thoughtful and sensitive response to the subject as our work progressed, an amiable companion on a journey of endless revelation.

Golden legacy of a saintly boat race

As thoughts turn to the legacy of Britain's stunning 2012 Olympic Games, the bizarre consequences of a little-known boat race that once took place in Scotland's Inner Hebrides come to mind. Many centuries ago two saints had challenged each other in the task of bringing the Christian message to the people of Britain. As sporting competitions go, its progress and outcome are up there with the best of them.

The two missionaries had travelled across the sea from Ireland in their little coracle boats, vessels so fragile that the early Britons described them as leaves, blown by the wind. Spying a suitable island near the mainland, St Columba and St Moluag agreed that the first of them to touch land would claim the island as his own and build his monastery base there.

St Columba rowed the quickest and drew near to the island's shore, certain of victory as he pulled ahead of his rival on the final stretch. St Moluag is said by his colourful medieval hagiographer to have then hacked off one of his own fingers in desperation, and flung it ahead of St Columba on to the beach. From a technical point of view, he had indeed 'touched' the land first, and so the great monastic island was his: the Isle of Lismore.

Unfortunately for St Columba there were no Olympic judging reviews available at the time - this was the late 6th century. Instead the saint had to turn his boat around and seek consolation elsewhere. As silver medals go, his was to prove the most enduring and evocative of any Christian foundation in the entire country: the Isle of Iona.

Few if any pilgrims make their way to Lismore's quiet shores now, in contrast to its one-time rival at mighty Iona. After many miles walking the peaceful tracks and lanes of this beautiful sliver of land, I finally found the beach where these two spiritual athletes supposedly challenged each other. No monument marks the grassy shoreline, pictured above, merely the ruins of a cottage that once housed an illegal whisky still and some navigational buoys stored on land.

Traces of Lismore's glory can however be found at the main kirk on the island, a beautiful white-painted building. It is housed in part of the mighty cathedral church that once stood here, the rest now demolished. Like the forgotten shoreline I had the place to myself. It is an evocative place to wander through the scenes of our past glories.

Holy wells move south

It is tricky to write about holy wells and their use by Christians in Britain. In times gone by they were so widespread and popular there is almost too much to talk about. Today on the other hand their use is so rare that there is almost too little to talk about.

But the gap between the two is narrowing steadily.

On 4 June 2012 I was delighted to attend the first well dressing in Bedfordshire, which celebrated the evocative sacred spring that emerges from bedrock beneath Stevington’s parish church. It’s a site listed in my guide book, and I jumped at the chance to join such a remarkable revival, which the villagers combined with their Jubilee celebrations.

Stevington’s holy well was once used as a curative bath by a medieval hospital run by a monastery. It later became the inspiration to a famous Christian writer from a very different Christian era: John Bunyan. Over the Jubilee bank holiday weekend in Stevington, both these long traditions were remembered by a pageant play, during which a large and cheerful crowd of villagers walked from the village cross to the church, stopping to hear scenes from Bunyan’s masterpiece Pilgrim’s Progress. It ended with drinks on the beautiful lawns of Kathy Brown’s Garden, and afternoon tea in the nearby Church Room.

I’ve argued in my book that Christianity’s cultural output is much more appealing than its theological offerings. The thought occurred to me again as I joined what must have been more than 200 local people celebrating their sacred history. The Times newspaper even carried a half-page article in advance of the event, written by Kathy Brown herself.

This is after all the quintessential holiday experience: the very name holiday means ‘holy day’. In times gone by a community would stop work and hold an annual festival to mark some important date in the Christian calendar, perhaps the patron of their church, or a saint with a local connection - or indeed a festival based around their holy well. Well dressing events have proved to be some of the most enduring examples of such holiday celebrations, and are still popular in parts of the Midlands. The Well Dressing website lists over 100 villages which currently hold an annual event.

Stevington is the newest entry on the list. On display in Stevington’s church porch was the village’s very own floral panel. This sumptuous composition, pictured at the top of this post, is based on the scene from Pilgrim’s Progress where Christian’s burden falls into a cavernous sepulchre, which is modelled on the grotto where Stevington’s holy spring emerges.

Stevington’s celebration is much nearer to my home in SW London than the main Derbyshire well dressing locations, though it would have been worth driving to John O’Groats to experience something as imaginative and uplifting as this community’s lovely and lively day. The little village of Tissington in Derbyshire has the most famous floral displays, viewed by an astonishing 50,000 visitors each year.

I was preaching the night before Stevington’s well dressing at Hertford College, Oxford, and used the city’s holy well at Binsey to make a point about the popular appeal of Christian tradition. It was Trinity Sunday, and at Stevington I proudly mentioned that I had contrived a sermon which dovetailed both the theology of the Trinity and the use of holy wells into my talk. One of the villagers replied that their new vicar, Canon Peter Mackenzie, had managed to link not only the holy well with the Trinity but also the Royal Jubilee celebrations too in a single memorable sermon.

This village once helped Bunyan write one of the world’s most influential and best-selling books. Its sacred landscape has lost none of its power to inspire.

Is the sea good for the soul?

It is the world's most popular tourist attraction by far, the sea. Where else do people go when they have extended leisure time to enjoy, a place for rest and recuperation since... well, who knows how long? This may be one of the fundamental characteristics of human nature that predates all recorded history. Our attachment to natural water runs deep, a basic instinct that we now hurry to satisfy during two weeks off each year.

A new study by the British Psychological Society published in April 2012 demonstrates what most of us have indeed guessed at: the sea is a place of great psychological healing. Getting out into nature has long been known to alleviate symptoms of mental health problems such as stress and depression. It seems that the sea is the greatest of all such agents of natural healing. But have beach resorts and package holiday companies always had the monopoly of this watery phenomenon?

There was a time when religion embraced natural water in the performance of its rites, and not just pagan ones either. The first known Christian liturgy of baptism insisted that entry into the church took place not in a font or even a manmade pool, but a source of naturally flowing water. Baptismal candidates were fully immersed in front of the entire congregation of the church, and not merely naked but stripped of all artificial objects such as jewellery and hair fastenings. It was a rebirth that was as much a physical experience as it was spiritual, a ritual that included both soul and body in ways that seem alien to modern Christianity.

A Christian's immersion didn't end with this single rite of passage either. The use of water for rituals other than baptism is first recorded (as far as I can tell - feedback welcome!) in the writings of Lady Egeria, a brave Spanish pilgrim who travelled from northern Europe to the Holy Land in the 4th century and wrote an amazing travel journal. In it she describes a holy well at Aenon, near Salem, which was originally used by St John the Baptist. "Many brethren, holy monks, direct their steps hither from various places that they may wash there," she writes, and adds that she herself took part in all the customary rituals of the site. Alas she fails to tell us anything about what these 'customary' rituals involved, but perhaps she bathed there too.

Closer to home, the great bishop and abbot St Cuthbert was known to wade into the sea to say his prayers, off the Northumberland coastline at Lindisfarne and Coldingham. I've since discovered around a dozen examples of such hardy devotional practice among Britain's early saints. I did try to emulate St Cuthbert's 7th century example when I visited Lindisfarne late one summer (pictured above) and found it one of the most peaceful and moving experiences to be had at any of Britain's 500 sacred sites listed in my book. So simple too, without any artifice to separate me from creation: no church, no book, no candle, no people.

Any such use of holy water has perhaps become the most neglected of all early church rituals - in the Anglican tradition at least. Which is why it is a happy surprise to hear recently that one church in North Yorkshire has decided to incorporate its charming holy well into weekly liturgical use. During the summer months of 2012, the community at Thornton-in-Craven will hold a short Sprinkling Service every Saturday at 12 noon, from Easter week to the end of September.

The Anglican church lacks any formal liturgy for the use of holy wells, but Thornton's service is based on the form of words used in the Anglican shrine at Little Walsingham in Norfolk. This shrine contains the Church of England's most active holy well by far - though it has scant competition for such a title. A rarity still in Anglican tradition, Thornton's pioneering efforts are all the more valuable for that.

A precedent for Archbishop John Sentamu

It is a little-known fact that a black African churchman has been offered the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. Despite being asked repeatedly to take up the job due to his outstanding intellectual credentials, however, this forgotten pioneer turned it down. And now, a mere 1,350 years later, it seems possible that another African-born prelate might finally take up the role.

The strongest candidate to succeed Archbishop Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of York John Sentamu, who was born in Uganda. As prime candidate he is already following in the footsteps of St Adrian, a North African who was offered the role in the year 668.

St Adrian has been largely forgotten by the church today, despite the fact that he did accept a lesser but still highly influential role in the 7th century English church. He has had a lasting impact as a result, and could easily be described as one of the founding figures of both the church and the English nation as a whole.

His work in establishing a network of monastic schools means that he can be credited as one of the founders of our entire educational system. Oxford and Cambridge themselves later grew out of the church’s promotion of learning, which St Adrian helped to establish all those centuries earlier. St Adrian was a genius, fluent in several languages and an expert across the academic spectrum, conversant in astronomy and mathematics as much as in theology and classical Greek.

St Adrian’s formal role was abbot of Canterbury’s monastery, which meant he acted as an adviser to the Archbishops in the city.  He spent 39 years nurturing the nascent English church, and died in the year 710 on 9 January, which is now kept as his saint’s day by those who remember him. His grave site is now lost, but lies somewhere amid the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey, a peaceful English Heritage site a few minutes walk from the cathedral, pictured at the top of this post. Hardly anyone else was visiting the site on the three occasions I called by to pay my respects to our history, in contrast to the bustling cathedral nearby.

He would be an apt figure to remember at the consecration of our next Archbishop under any circumstances. St Adrian’s academic brilliance also puts me in mind of our current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who was magnanimous in accepting the job despite all the difficulties and burdens that frightened off St Adrian.

On a final historical note, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be recognised as a saint is St Boniface of Savoy, who was enthroned in 1249 and died in 1270. He too was caught up in the fiercest arguments of his day, standing between the King and the pro-democracy rebel Simon de Montford, neither of whom he managed to please entirely.

It took nearly 600 years after St Boniface’s death before he was formally recognised as a saint in 1839. Just occasionally there are people whose saintly attributes shine through rather quicker than that. 

Our oldest Christian artefact?

I once asked a devout gathering of Christians if they could name the oldest artefact believed to bear witness to British Christianity. You probably won’t have heard of it, no matter how devout you are. But it tells quite a story.

A lady in the crowd nearly threw me completely by answering at once: “The thorn tree at Glastonbury.” She was right - in a way. This tree supposedly sprung to life from the staff carried by St Joseph of Arimathea, a contemporary of Christ. Medieval legend claimed that Joseph visited Glastonbury after Christ’s death, bearing the Holy Grail and his miracle-working staff. You can still see an offshoot of this holy thorn tree in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, pictured above. If the legends are correct, it was created by miracle soon after Christ’s death, so it is nearly 2,000 years old.

But a thorn tree is not technically an artefact, a manufactured object. So my tale can continue.

Rather than the enigmatic hill of Glastonbury, the actual location of our earliest evidence for Christian activity is a museum in Manchester.

There in a display case sits a fragment of pottery discovered during an archaeological dig in the city centre, on Deansgate in 1976. It is said to date from around the year 182, and has scratched on its surface part an enigmatic riddle, thought by many to be a secret Christian code. The BBC has a picture of it here.

This code is known as the Sator Square, and it looks like this:

ROTAS

OPERA

TENET

AREPO

SATOR

The words read the same in all four directions, an amazing piece of wordplay that is almost impossible to arrange in any language. The five Latin words do make sense up to a point, since they translate as: ‘Arepo the sower guides the wheels with care’. But hidden within them are the words ‘Pater Noster’ with the two additional letters A and O, or Alpha and Omega.

You can read much more about the meaning, history and claimed Christian associations of the enigmatic Sator Square on the internet, starting with Wikipedia.

At the simplest level, however, it serves as a reminder that the earliest Christians in the 2nd century were forced to celebrate their faith in near total secrecy, often in the face of persecution and death. Quite how Christianity survived – let alone prospered – in such adverse conditions gives pause for thought.

Now it is a common lament to hear that Christianity is being marginalised from society, that it is losing its public voice, its influence and its respect. I know many religious, church-going people who claim to have little interest in church history and traditions, but we can take comfort by knowing our past.

An ingenious cryptogram scratched on shard of ancient pottery is a reminder that we have coped with worse.

What the pagans did for us

“You mean somewhere like Stonehenge?” is a common reaction when I tell people I’ve written a book on our main sacred sites, Britain's Holiest Places. If only my task had been that simple. Stonehenge is absent, an omission that will certainly raise a few eyebrows – so I will begin this blog by looking at the curious reality of such enchanting early sites.

We love our pre-Christian heritage, and rightly so. Britain’s standing stones are recognised around the world. They are archetypes of the human instinct to make our mark on the landscape, a permanent monument to a transitory life.

The first place I took my father-in-law, to whom my book is dedicated, on his only trip outside Russia was Stonehenge. As we paced the perimeter, he spotted two people who had been on the same flight as him three hours earlier.

It is sacred and spiritual to a level that is almost iconic. And yet…

There are no written records, nor even cave art yet discovered, that tell us the first thing about what the people who built Stonehenge did there. Bizarrely it was Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, who gives us the first known written reference to pagan practice in Britain, though Stonehenge was over 2,000 years old by the time his invasion force set foot here in 55BC.

Archaeologists continue to announce new discoveries that might indicate some of Stonehenge’s functions: mausoleum, temple, palace, parliament, astronomical observatory – or a combination of any of these.

We simply don’t know whether they even considered it holy themselves. We don’t know what gods or god they followed – if any. Having had meaningful interaction with 500 holy places across Britain, I would dearly wish as much as anybody to know how to approach the evocative henges and enchanted stone circles that draw us to them with their primal energies.

There is an absence of authentic ritual that many would like to be addressed. I am sure organisations such as the newly recognised Druid Network will help to fill this void, with fresh interpretations of landscape and ritual that will satisfy those in search of spiritual experiences with a pre-Christian complexion. The Network was registered as a religious charity in September 2010 by the Charities Commission, the first such neopagan body to stand on an official footing. See the BBC News report for more information.

But I also hope that the reinvention of an older faith makes room for creative dialogue with the one that supplanted it. I can’t speak for the neopagans but I suspect many Christians won’t be happy at the prospect. It would be a loss for both sides, because there is a surprising amount for us to explore together.

I am talking mostly about the many places listed in my book where Christian and pagan activity overlapped in the earliest years of the conversion of Britain. Those who seek the original Christian church will find themselves increasingly bumping into pagans as they chart back through our history. Every single person in the early church knew pagans, and we can get closer to that original context ourselves.

Take just one example, the tiny holy well at Invermoriston in Scotland, which is named after St Columba and lies a short walk from the shores of Loch Ness. It appears in my book on page 505, and you can find information on the internet too. It was restored in 2005 and should interest anyone with a sense of the sacred.

St Columba came to Invermoriston himself in 565 when the area was still pagan. A Life of the saint records that a witch had cursed the well, which is pictured at the top of this blog entry. Local druids hoped it would poison the interfering missionary, who had come to see their king. Instead he blessed the waters and then drank without harm. Such anecdotes are invaluable: thanks to this story alone we can say confidently that pagans believed in black magic at natural springs, and we also understand how a previously pagan landscape was written over by the blessing of a saint.

I know what to do at this and other holy wells, thanks in large part to our pioneering Celtic missionaries. They adopted these sites from earlier faiths, and in doing so provide a continuity with the past that is entirely absent at monuments such as Stonehenge. The limpid waters of St Columba’s Well ripple with meaning when you touch their surface – a glimpse at secrets our ancient stones can not so easily yield.