A landmark shrine for Bede?

Britain's first and only doctor of the worldwide church has a surprisingly peaceful corner of a city dedicated to his memory. Surrounded by the busy conurbation of Newcastle, Gateshead and South Shields, an enclave of riverside tranquillity has somehow survived on the very site where the Venerable Bede created history, both literally and figuratively. That this site was briefly under threat in recent months is almost too shocking to contemplate, something the national media has thankfully appreciated.

The stone church in which Bede worshipped still stands, its dedication stone from the year 685 the oldest in the country. Facts are scarce commodities if you happen to be studying the early British church, but this one is solid enough to put a dent in your head should it happen to fall on you. It won't, needless to say, since this church has been standing for 1,330 years and counting.

The building that Bede knew is so small it serves only as a little chancel to the much larger church that has built up around it, a holy space dimly lit by a row of tiny windows high up, containing fragments of 7th century stained glass. Its confines demonstrate just how far the great writer and thinker transcended both time and space.

Walking into this ancient room today, pictured above, it feels narrow and dark despite the later addition of larger medieval windows. Yet in Bede's day this was the outer limits of architecture, a marvel of carved stonework and coloured glazing that would have made jaws drop. Its preservation is remarkable, a fitting counterpart in stone to the many manuscripts that have transmitted Bede's written testimonies.

The fact that the adjacent museum, Bede's World, has managed to fit in an 11-acre working medieval farm says everything about the air of seclusion that preserves this remarkable site. A quiet enclave on the edge of a busy industrial landscape, surrounded by trees and parkland with a 7th century church at its heart. Does Christian heritage come any better than this?

Sadly though it transpires that the museum has run into difficulties in recent months. It has temporarily closed due to a lack of funding, although fortunately a possible new manager has recently been announced in the shape of the environmental charity the Groundwork Trust. I can not help wondering if the church will play a more active role in the revived centre under its new lease of life.

Mark Bryant, bishop of Jarrow, is listed as one of the trustees of the previous custodian, the Bede's World charity, which is currently in administration. Whether the church maintains its connections with the new management will be interesting to follow, and one can only hope the relationship becomes stronger rather than weaker.

The charity that used to run Bede's World explicitly lists the joint promotion of both museum and church as one of its chief purposes. Visiting this lovely and atmospheric site for research into my holy places project, it did feel there was something of a disconnect between the two centres here, which are just 200 metres apart across a small park. The Groundwork Trust has good roots in the design sector, and I felt then as now that some sort of creative landscape corridor between the two would greatly improve the historical and spiritual impact of the visitor experience.

Bede's church broke new ground in its day, the first place to show off stained glass to an awe-struck population. An innovative piece of environmental design or landmark work of art would surely be the best way to remember this outpost of creative brilliance. Government cuts are a large part of the reason why this museum has got into difficulties, economically illiterate and intellectually hostile to Britain's cultural history in equal measure. The potential of good heritage sites to generate income and regenerate place have been left to one side, but the case for funding greater integration between the Bede's World site and the church seems compelling.

The lack of relationship between museum and church was a disconnect I felt at numerous sites of national historical importance on my journeys around Britain, but it is more acute at Jarrow than elsewhere because this is such a foundational site, and because it has so much potential.

Perhaps the museum won't ever be interested in pilgrimage, and the church will certainly never regard itself as a museum. But somewhere between the two lies one of the greatest cultural and spiritual heritage centres this country has to offer.

This is after all an unusual pilgrimage site because it doesn't have a shrine as such. I can't help but wonder what effect the creation of a National Shrine to the Venerable Bede would have on the status of this interesting assembly of visitor attractions. Just 12 miles away stands another ancient church which is effectively part of this same complex, the Monkwearmouth monastic church of St Peter. Bede's monastery was known as Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, a twin monastic complex split between two locations. Although St Peter's is not as well preserved or as secluded as the Jarrow site, it contains just enough original fabric to embellish the story further.

Thus it seems to me that two of Britain's oldest stone churches and a beautiful, modern museum might benefit from a clearer focus, particularly one with such impeccable credentials as the authentic experience. It might be argued that pilgrim sites will only attract the devout, but even a brief read of Chaucer will demonstrate that this has never been the case.

I do not know any of the people involved in either the church or museum personally, but none of the press reports describing the fate of Bede's World refer to any Anglican involvement in negotiations about its future. So far it seems that the environmental charity Groundwork is being presented as the saviour, thanks no doubt in large part to the fascinating and extensive medieval farm which is part of the museum complex. The Groundwork Trust is a good fit and a laudable choice, but the church has a far longer pedigree when it comes to safeguarding space.

As my own research into the early British church is steadily revealing, protection of the landscape was once hard wired in to Christian mission. The church was once the environmental charity of its day: the National Trust, English Heritage, the RSPB, the RSPCA and Groundwork have all become worthy successors to the church in protecting the natural and built heritage of the country. But as Bede himself wrote so often and so eloquently, the early saints too would gather animals around them, preach to birds and worship among wildlife.

I will publish my discoveries in due course, and it will be another book that encourages love for the landscape. Whether the church will rediscover some of its cosmological impetus for protecting place as well as people remains to be seen, but it's a topic close to my heart, and I think as relevant today as it was in 685 AD.

(Above: the dedication stone at St Paul's Church, Jarrow. The first word dedicatio is as easy to read as Latin gets)

It's not every day you wake up to find yourself naked on the front cover of Church Times, the august publication for hard-working vicars and other gentlefolk of the Church of England. In fact - and I'll go out on a limb here - I'd even say it is not something that happens any day, since I might just have managed to be the first person who can add this particular event to my CV.

I wasn't exactly expecting it, although it's not a complete surprise because I had written a feature for the newspaper about naturist holidays and the many Christians who go on them. Church Times has a remarkably good feel for the eye-catching possibilities of all religious news, so I suppose it makes editorial sense they took the rare opportunity to choose nudity to lead this week's edition.

Last week's edition raised a small media outcry (well, Daily Mail at least) objecting to the presumably light-hearted suggestion by the Bishop of London that growing a beard might endear a [male] vicar to his neighbours in a multicultural part of London. At least this week's edition won't get accused of the same thing!

So although the cover might get a few grumbles, as I intend to explain below this topic isn't outside the realms of British culture and tradition, particularly so during our long Christian era. The article itself recounts the experiences of six CofE priests and ministers who are naturists, seven if you count me, and explains how the two sit side by side, or together for some people. I don't personally consider myself a 'Christian naturist' as a single category any more than I would consider myself a 'Christian sunbather' or a 'Christian Londoner', although in all of these the two can interact in some circumstances.

Naturists are famously shy about admitting this is something they do, but I think the best policy in all in life is to be open and honest, and take whatever people fire back at you with good grace and understanding. Not that I've ever heard any significant negative reaction to my lack of bathing attire, despite being completely open about it (and writing guide books on it a few years ago). Heck, I even ended up on the front page of The Times newspaper, which means today I have mooned at the full set of readers of papers with the word 'Times' at the end.

One of the great myths about our country is that we are unusually prudish and repressed about the human body. Looking around the world at large I'd have to say we're much closer to the opposite end of the "heavens-cover-up-the-table-leg-before-I-have-a-heart-attack" scale of sensitivity, even considering our Victorian heritage. And when it comes to nudity for mundane activities such as swimming, our history is not nearly as buttoned up as common consensus would have it. Perhaps nowadays we are among the worst culprits when it comes to conflating the two distinct - if overlapping - categories of sex and nudity. It was not always thus however. We are north Europeans too, if not quite as 'northern' or as 'European' as some of the others.

Nude bathing might seem like an exotic, continental and Scandinavian pursuit, but I've been surprised in recent years by the number of older people, men especially, who claim to have learned to swim without clothes on, in swimming pool lessons here in Britain. Unthinkable now for sure but it goes to show how far custom has changed even within the course of a lifetime, and long after the Victorian period ended.

And it's not just men either who have experienced skinny-dipping. Near to where I grew up there was a lake, called the Black Pond on Esher Common, which is secluded amid shrubs, trees and a circle of reeds. This was a ladies' bathing pond, and the custom right up until the early 1970s was for swimmers to bathe in the nude. Again it is seemingly unthinkable now, but yet within living memory, and once part of the British landscape in leafy Surrey.

These various customs represent an unbroken tradition of unfussy bare bathing that stretches back all the way to – I'm pretty sure – the birth of the human race. Christianity has rarely had an absolute problem with bathing in one's birthday suit, and even its reaction to mixed naked bathing from late Antiquity onwards has been nuanced, and never consistently opposed.

As St Augustine of Hippo himself pointed out, it's all about context:

"Because it is a shamefully wicked thing to strip the body naked at a banquet among the drunken and licentious, it does not follow that it is a sin to be naked in the baths."
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Chapter 12.

Roll forward a millennium from Augustine and the late middle ages had still not seen the invention of the swimming costume. The beautifully illustrated devotional book the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry has a charming little scene of swimmers on one of its pages illustrating the activities of the month of August. Not only are all four stripped off to bathe in public, near a road, they are clearly a mixed-sex group of adults, a woman sitting on the bank a few paces from the men enjoying a cooling dip. I defy any Christian to find such a prospect anything other than innocent, harmless and rather inviting on a hot day.

This scene is tame in comparison with what can be seen on so many medieval church walls in any case, crowds of naked figures jostling in a Doom painting. At Hardham in Sussex the local congregation sat in front of a huge wall painting of a naked Christ being baptised, which would have rather livened up any sermon on the Incarnation. Or any sermon, come to think of it. A similar image can be seen in more detail at Black Bourton church in Oxfordshire.

In South Leigh's lovely church of St James, also in Oxfordshire, the cluster of souls awaiting judgement are quite naked - apart from the bishops and royals, who are endearingly allowed to keep their hats on. Alas for the bishop of London though, it appears beards are banned in the afterlife.

Back in the world today it is not just church walls that are certified nude-free. Even the changing rooms of a public swimming pools are being altered to design out any possibility of even single-sex bare skin being seen. There are no doubt some good reasons for these moves, and I can't imagine I would have been at all impressed at the prospect of enforced nude swimming lessons, and I say that despite being a naturist for as long as I can remember. So it happens for good reasons, but I can't help wondering what the effect is of completely shutting down any sense of commonplace, mundane nudity as part of everyday life experiences for people of every age.

If the termination of commonplace nude bathing opportunities has been sudden and, despite what we might now assume, contrary to our long culture in Britain - so too perhaps the naturist movement is something of an over-reaction the other way. Mixed-sex nude bathing, not to mention socialising in a naturist environment, might well be a step too far for many people, oversteering against the tide.

But if so it is a necessary over-correction, because the body deserves better than a one-sided debate or fixed moral position, certainly in any Christian-based culture with our heritage of Greek and Roman attitudes mixed beneath the Mediterranean sunshine. The body is far too contradictory and multifunctional to be stuck in any particular box: the nude can be a symbol of innocence or licentiousness, physical prowess or weakness, confidence or humility, athletic strength or frail vulnerability, even birth and death. Perhaps, in the context of swimming, it once had no meaning at all.

Italy covered up some nude statues just this week to avoid offending the different cultural and religious values of Iran's president, classical works of art that were never intended to be offensive, and would not normally considered as such either in Europe. The same can be said of the vast amount of nudity in Christian art too, representations that are unthinkable in other parts of the world but nothing to be ashamed of.

It's probably not an exaggeration to say that people today are seeing more images of naked people, as opposed to real naked people, than at any point in human history. Perhaps there is a link between the astonishing rise in pornography and the end of mundane nudity. Like any other natural resource, the body appears now to have been removed from public space and packaged up for resale back to us, like the forests, land and water. I may be wrong but I think there is reason why the first top-shelf magazines in the 1950s and 60s depicted nudists, people outdoors enjoying the sun and water. Breach that last line of defence and the body no longer has any public space for innocence or freedom.

The numbers of nude images online must run into the millions by now, most of them in a different category to the innocuous Church Times cover. So perhaps it will encourage a few curious readers to wonder if there is another way of looking at what it means to embrace our humanity, even to peer beyond Adam and Eve's fall from grace and wonder what it was like there.

My article was slightly truncated to fit the space, but I did intend to stress out that naturists have no copyright over outdoor nudity, and anyone should be able to enjoy a skinny dip in the wild every now and then. My Christian inspiration for this ultimately derives from the idea of the baptism, being born again in natural waters wearing our original birthday suit once more, but that is a topic for another day.

One thing will say after a lifetime considering all such matters from a Christian perspective, is that from a theological perspective I can never accept that the body should be reclassified as an inherently pornographic or obscene object. Jesus had a body and it never was either of those things.

Britain's holy places back on television

BBC Four is now showing the television series based on my book again: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r6z2d

And it will be on iPlayer for the next week or so. The one good thing about BBC Four's relatively modest commissioning budget means they tend to repeat their original programming quite often, so this is our third outing on TV.

There probably won't be a second television series in this specific format, much as I'd love to work with the same team again on such an interesting and appealing topic. However I am starting a research project in the autumn on the origins of certain holy places and practices, which should eventually result in another book. Will post more on here in due course.

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.

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.

Back on the screens, summer 2013

Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places (the TV series) is back on our screens this summer, and hence available on iPlayer for those who missed some episodes last time round. The series was first broadcast in March/April 2013 and will be showing again starting 4 August 2013. It is based on my book, which was published in 2011.

The BBC's programme website has information about upcoming episodes and also links to iPlayer versions, which remain active for about six weeks after first broadcast.

The series proved a ratings and a critical hit. But alas it probably won't make a second series in its current guise: the subject has attracted the interest of other presenters, so the topic will at least live on. Celebrities are everything in the media, but I'm sure the power of holy places to tell their own stories will shine through whatever the format.

Sales of my book and the new iPad/iPhone version (available on iTunes) have helped open up our sacred landscape to a new generation of pilgrims, but it is the subject itself that generates all the enthusiasm. Holy places have lost none of their power to enlighten and enchant.

Holy heritage: a boost for Wales

Welsh Assembly member William Powell has called for his country to do more to promote its amazing spiritual heritage. Our recent television series has helped to raise the profile of an amazing legacy of landscapes and histories to be found in Wales.

It is fertile territory in every sense, a land full of Celtic mystery, grand ruins and striking landscapes to attract visitors from all over the world. And it also offers quieter places where local people can gain a sense of identity and connection, a community hub. Or both combined in one, as at St Davids Cathedral where the congregation recently restored its shrine to the patron saint of Wales in 2012 (pictured above in all its revived glory).

This article in Wales Online today (9 May 2013) refers to our recent TV series, which did indeed show off many of the more eye-catching sites and stories around the country. 'Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places' was funded jointly by BBC Four and Welsh-language channel S4C - which meant that two out of every six sites in each episode were in Wales. Finding beautiful places with exotic tales to tell proved to be very easy.

By way of example, the country is home to "the oldest site of ritual activity in the whole of Britain and western Europe", as the article quotes me saying. Which is true... but for the record I should add that the ancient site in question is so difficult to reach you would risk life and limb to get there if the tides were against you. It's unlikely to become any sort of visitor attraction soon, but the entertaining tale of its discovery shows just how much meaning we invest in our sacred sites.

Goat's Hole Cave on the Gower peninsula is where a slightly dotty 19th century academic discovered the ritual burial of a young man. We mentioned it in the caves episode of the TV series (described in the post below). The body was covered in red ochre and placed inside the cave with shell and bone ornaments. A ritual burial so ancient it involved the tusk of a woolly mammoth, dating back some 33,000 years.

All of this was of great interest to Professor Buckland of Oxford University, who arrived at the cave in a hurry in January 1823, following the cave's discovery by a local doctor and his curate friend the year before. Professor Buckland examined the remains at length before declaring this to be the burial of a woman from the Roman era, probably a witch of some sort. And so the burial is known erroneously as the Red Lady of Paviland.

In fact it remains to this day the oldest known ritual burial in western Europe, offering a tantalising glimpse into a world of forgotten devotions, seemingly a belief in the afterlife that we will never fully understand. Dealing with death is one of the founding principles in pretty much any religion, and Wales can proudly lay claim to the earliest such evidence in this region.

The reason for Professor Buckland's wildly inaccurate dating is also of religious origins: as a devout Creationist he believed the world to be no older than a few thousand years. An interesting handicap for a Professor of Geology.

It is a timely reminder there is much to inspire in our sacred past, and also much to learn from.

New app launched as TV series ends

Not content with just a book and a TV series, we've now launched an app version of Britain's Holiest Places, available on Apple devices. It contains all the listings in my book Britain's Holiest Places: 500 of the country's most beautiful, interesting and unexpected sacred sites. It has been launched at the conclusion of the BBC Four series 'Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places'.

The final episode on 11 April at 8.30pm looks at what happens when religion goes underground. Crypts and caves may seem at first glance like the least promising environments in which to gain any sort of spiritual enlightenment. And yet they are where pivotal moments in many different faiths have taken place: the Prophet Mohammed received his first revelation in a cave, and Buddha lived in one for a time. And as the TV programme explores, they are resonant throughout the life of Christ and Christians who came after.

The earliest known ritual activity in Britain, presumably of religious purpose, is a cave burial on the Gower peninsula, at Goat's Hole Cave near Paviland. A young man's body was covered in red ochre and a mammoth's tusk placed alongside, dating back around 33,000 years ago. In the TV programme we visit a similar burial of about 14,000 years ago, its grave goods providing some of the earliest art in Britain: Kendrick's Cave in Llandudno.

Quite what the Ice Age inhabitants of Wales believed about the afterlife is unknowable after so many millennia have passed. But we have been using caves as sacred places ever since. As we demonstrate in the evocative crypt of Ripon Cathedral, the tomb of Christ himself is a place of subterranean worship that has been instrumental in shaping the design of our worship spaces.

I spent five years travelling around Britain to seek out our most evocative and sometimes most remote holy places in order to write my book, and we spent four months doing the same with the TV crew to make this series. Cursing my way through nettles, creeping along hedgerows, criss-crossing barren moors and trespassing more times than I care to admit, an app guide to holy places would so often have been the answer to all my prayers. Our oldest human narratives are now available on the most modern of devices.

I once spent half a day trying to locate the bizarre, other-worldly chasm known as Lud's Church in Staffordshire (pictured above). Lud's Church also appears in the final episode of the BBC series. Its green dripping walls were the scene of both spiritual fiction, in the shape of a reference in the medieval saga Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and also the place where an early Lollard meeting of Christian reformers was lethally broken up in the 15th century by soldiers.

It makes a pretty convincing hiding place even today, evading me for hours on end. I practically fell through its hidden opening on to my knees in gratitude when I finally tracked it down. Now thanks to our new app it appears on a map at the touch of a screen, alongside my own location notes written to prevent any more wasted journeys. From grand city-centre cathedrals to obscure hermit caves miles from anywhere, Britain's religious heritage has never been so accessible as it is today.

The app is published by S4C, the Welsh-language TV station which has been hugely supportive of the project, no doubt inspired by the amazing spiritual landscape in Wales. A free Welsh-language mini-version of the app is also available, covering just the 38 or so locations in the TV series, which was filmed in both English and Welsh language versions.

The app costs £5.49, and has been developed by the TV production company Cwmni Da, where the TV presenter Ifor ap Glyn works. They and S4C have done the project proud, with an app and a TV series that open up this amazing landscape to anyone looking for life-changing encounters with the past.

No man is an island

In the landscapes of the Old Testament, God is to be found in the wilderness. On mountains and in the desert, He is encountered where people are not. “They looked towards the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared,” as the writer of Exodus puts it.

Here in Britain our green and mostly pleasant land lacks the parched earth and waste places that make the Holy Land so special. But we do have rather a lot of islands, and the fifth part of the BBC Four series Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places sets sail to explore the insular devotions that have marked so many as special. The episode was broadcast on Thursday 4 April at 8.30pm, and will be available on iPlayer for a month or so afterwards. It is based on my guide book Britain's Holiest Places.

My book includes 20 islands that have seen significant spiritual activity, five of which appear in the TV programme. Many remain active today, including the famous Holy Island of Lindisfarne. More surprising is the reinvented spiritual continuity to be found at Holy Isle off Arran. During our visit there we speak to a Buddhist community leader called Choden about the latest incarnation of this very special holy place, now called the World Centre for Peace and Health.

Other beautiful and evocative places of retreat include St Herbert’s Isle on Derwentwater, which graces the cover of my book (pictured at the top of the page). Alas on the day we visited with the film crew it was grey and raining, yet the natural beauty which inspired St Herbert here in the 7th century remains. Presenter Ifor ap Glyn can be seen in the picture above, wisely opting to be towed back from the island as the storm gathered strength. The two images show St Herbert's Isle in very different moods.

And being a proudly Welsh-leaning programme, we also visit two evocative islands in the west of Britain. Llanddwyn, off Anglesey, is where a princess fled from a failed marriage, nursing her broken heart to become a devout hermit.

And finally there is Bardsey Island, or Ynys Enlli in the native tongue, the island in the currents with a treacherous sea crossing and a sacred pedigree like no other. So many great church leaders and their faithful followers chose to be buried on Bardsey it gained the name ‘Island of 20,000 Saints’. Although fewer than a dozen are formally recognised as saints, it was declared in the 12th century by the Pope himself that three pilgrimages there were of equivalent penitential value to one trip to Jerusalem. Alas another storm blew up during our attempted visit, and instead we watched the sun set over the sea behind this magical island from a striking windswept headland (pictured below).

A previous episode showed how water was seen as a place of rebirth, so perhaps it is logical that paradise should be located on an island across the sea, a journey that the soul alone makes when freed from earthly constraints. An illuminating interview with Canon Chris Pullin at Hereford Cathedral literally maps out the theology of such a poetic concept, as he describes the cosmology encoded into Britain’s largest medieval map, the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

The Garden of Eden was once believed to be a real, earthly paradise that acted as a sort of stepping stone between this world and heaven, where souls gathered to await the Last Judgement. It appears as an island in Hereford's 13th-century map, on the eastern most extremity of the world: a pleasant surprise for Japanese tourists, no doubt, since it sits roughly where their homeland is located.

It is no mere spiritual accident or even a purely Christian innovation to place the afterlife beyond the shores: Norse warriors would send their dead out to sea in a funeral boat, a great pyre set over the water in the tale of Beowulf, or simply bury them on land in a complete boat, such as the Sutton Hoo ship burials. In New Zealand the Maori legends record how souls depart from the northern tip of the islands on their final journey. In India cremated remains must be placed in the Ganges which carries them out to sea.

This is perhaps one of the things that draws us all to contemplate the sea’s horizon, the vast openness: infinity and eternity stretching before us.

The consolation of a shrine

What is a shrine? English is one of the few languages that has a term for this specific kind of holy place. In other languages you need to describe it by using a general word such as tomb, sanctuary, chapel or church and elaborate from there.

Our language gives us a head start when it comes to marking out somewhere special. In this week’s episode of Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places we take a tour round some of the most surprising examples of shrines to be found in this country. The programme is broadcast at 8.30pm on BBC Four, and will be available on iPlayer for some weeks after.

Our somewhat unexpected starting point is the roadside shrine to Marc Bolan, the musician killed in a road crash in Barnes in 1977. I went to school near this colourful memorial, which continues to attract flowers, messages and visitors in great number, honouring the memory of a modern-day star.

It may seem a far cry from the scenes of medieval devotion that shaped this country’s landscape, centres of pilgrimage that dominated our spiritual and cultural life for centuries. And yet our programme contains interviews with two of the country’s leading churchmen, who both describe the witness of saints and their shrines in strikingly human terms.

The Very Reverend Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans Cathedral (pictured above), gives an eloquent explanation of the desire to remember a loved one, an instinct that anyone can understand. “The main thing is that it’s a physical connection with the saint. We do this kind of thing in ordinary life… people sometimes keep a piece of jewellery from a loved one who has departed, or even a lock of hair.”

The Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales (pictured above), also describes shrines as a testimony to human love for the departed. “There’s if you like not just a memory of the relationship but a living relationship with saints. I think it is sometimes a misunderstanding that we worship saints. We don’t. We offer them our love and we ask for their prayers.”

Archbishop Nichols goes on to describe the public outpouring of grief for Princess Diana after her death in 1997 as an authentic example of such reverence. This moment, he suggests, makes a return by the English to older ways of thinking about loved ones who have died, an end to the Reformation. It's a thought-provoking comment, as the Daily Telegraph has picked up among other commentators, but one that helps explain the restoration of shrines in British cathedrals and churches in the past two decades. 

Our programme ends at a place as far removed from the mighty cathedrals and grand shrines of Britain as it is possible to be. The remote church at Pennant Melangell in north-east Wales was filmed on a bright winter’s day, golden sunshine on freshly fallen snow that looks a vision more of heaven than earth. It contains the shrine of someone whose witness is mainly remembered as nothing more complicated than a love for the land and the wildlife that kept St Melganell company as a hermit in the 7th century.

She is often shown in the company of hares, in memory of the time she saved an animal from a hunter’s dogs. There is no city-centre cathedral to honour her memory: the valley remains as unspoiled as it was when she called it home. It is a place to commune with the elements. St Melganell’s emotional connection to the natural world somehow endures unaltered.

A pagan and a pilgrim

This week BBC Four is showing a beautifully filmed programme looking at the lingering holiness to be found amid trees and mountains, the third part in the TV series based on my book. It contains some surprises and fascinating insights into the way Britain became a Christian country, as presenter Ifor ap Glyn (pictured above at Roche chapel in Cornwall) continues his journey.

The BBC decided to call its series Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places, and this week we do actually get to meet a pagan at last, Philip Carr-Gomm. He is a druid and author whose extensive list of books bears an uncanny similarity to my own smaller list of works. Philip’s input proves worthy of being honoured in the programme’s title, an intelligent and sympathetic account of the way Christianity adapted itself to Britain’s sacred landscape.

When 6th century missionaries arrived in England from Rome, there were pagan temples across the country, with henges, sacred trees, mountain crags and holy springs that had long been revered by the people of Britain. The word ‘pagan’ was originally a term used to describe country people, rustic believers rather than sophisticated thinkers from the cities. Another term for paganism would be ‘folk religion’.

Such local spiritual expression found a rather more sympathetic hearing from the new religion of Christianity than one might expect. The most striking example I encountered while researching my book is one we visit in the programme, a mysterious henge church at Knowlton in Dorset. Philip and I are pictured at Knowlton above.

Some beautiful aerial shots – beyond my means as a humble guidebook writer – demonstrate the spiritual continuity of this alluring sacred site. Knowlton is a pre-Christian earthwork henge with the remnants of a grove of ancient yew trees at one end, just visible beside my left ear in the photo above. This is a sacred site from pagan times where unknown ceremonies were conducted.

And in the middle of the sweeping henge circle stands a church, now fallen into ruin. Two of our country's main religions have been and gone here, yet a sense of them still lingers strongly, a story of continuity etched rather deeper in the landscape than we might credit.

At the end of our programme, presenter Ifor ap Glyn visits Pendle Hill, where the inspirational Christian leader George Fox had a founding vision of the Quaker movement in the 17th century. Ifor reflects on the sometimes troubled relationship between Christianity and the remnants of pagan spirituality to be found in our landscape.

George Fox’s antipathy towards traces of pagan superstition is now commonplace in Christian thinking. Yet it wasn’t always like this.

Rather than abandon our pagan holy places, Britain’s early missionaries were instructed on no less an authority than the Pope himself to assimilate them into Christian places of worship, destroying only the idols contained within. Such a deeply held sense of belonging, of place, of community and of continuity with the past are the cornerstones of any religion. They satisfy a human need and remain almost universally appealing to people of any faith and none.

Yet such witness is almost never heard in the language expressed by the church today. Are we richer or poorer for withdrawing from Britain’s outdoor holy places, abandoning these spaces to the National Trust and English Heritage to interpret?

As always, I would encourage people to look, to visit, to experience… and make up their own minds. Our landscape is broad enough and old enough to provoke any number of opinions and reactions.

Time to take a dip: 14 March on BBC Four

Some nice comments on Twitter about the first episode of Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places, the new BBC Four series based in part on my book. I was a bit surprised the programme lingered so long over Dracula and the Twilight series at Whitby, but I am still fairly certain the remaining five episodes will have even more food for thought. And more spiritual content too... We live in hope!

The viewing figures were excellent, double the usual BBC Four numbers, following an extensive PR campaign in advance of transmission.

Anyway next week's episode is already in the diary and a preview clip is online at the programme website. It shows the presenter Ifor ap Glyn taking a sacred dip in the freezing waters at Holywell in North Wales. He was game enough to give it a go in November, though with most holy wells the water emerges from the ground at the same temperature all year round.

I appear earlier in the same episode at a holy well in Northumberland, at a place called Holystone. We were planning to perform a full-on Roman baptism ritual there but a health and safety notice from the National Trust thwarted our plans! The pool itself is an amazing place, set in a grove amid open fields, with a curious apse shape at one end that seems to reflect conventional Roman design for ceremonial architecture. There was once a Roman road that ran directly alongside the pool edge too, now lost in fields but confirmed recently by archaeologists.

Holystone is an evocative place to contemplate the experience of joining the early church, an elemental rite that would greatly surprise most modern Christians if seen in all its glory. I have written about the early ritual in a previous blog. Holystone might have seen use as just such a baptismal pool in this early church era, making it a rare artefact of early devotion not only in British terms but around the world. Ifor and I sat up the night before filming attempting to track down Latin text of the Roman baptismal creed, and ended up cobbling together our own notes. Even the internet has its limits.

In addition to such early immersion rituals, the programme more generally investigates our ongoing attachment to water as an aid for healing and health. Christian immersion itself is now very limited, yet we still buy natural spring water in great quantities, continue to visit spas and pools, and when we get our few weeks of annual holiday each year most of us head to the sea. When it comes to rest, recuperation and revival, water has no equal.

Standing amid the ruins

Where more evocative to start our BBC Four series than among the country's most magnificent ruins? These are icons of the British landscape, fixed in our collective imagination and capable of reaching out and inspiring anybody with the slightest interest in our island's history and heritage.

'Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places' begins on Thursday 7 March at 8.30pm on BBC Four. We visit six of our grandest and most thought-provoking ruins in episode one, which are:

• Wimpole Hall's folly, Cambridgeshire
• Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire
• Caerwent Roman town remains, Monmouthshire
• St Andrews Cathedral, Fife
• Coventry Cathedral, Warwickshire
• Strata Florida Abbey, Ceredigion

Neglect, wind and the rain, and the hammers of angry reformers alike have failed to eradicate these beautiful and thought-provoking places from our affections. It is ironic that these buildings are at the same time our most ruinous and also our most carefully preserved. Legal protection for historic monuments is the nation's way of saying that their history matters to us.

The first episode looks at how this apparently modern interest in heritage is part of a long story: even our nostalgia is nothing new. We visit the amazing Roman ruins at Caerwent, among the most substantial in northern Europe, and hear how the earliest Christian missionaries sought out such relics from a bygone empire as a building site for their humbler churches. Presenter Ifor ap Glyn is pictured above beside the remains of Caerwent's defensive walls.

And at Whitby Abbey the power of ruins to haunt our imagination is graphically illustrated by the tale of a writer who came in the 19th century and generated an entirely new genre of literature: Bram Stoker and his book Dracula.

While Coventry Cathedral's innovative combination of modern architecture with the shell of its medieval predecessor demonstrates that devotional use of a holy site can survive even the second world war's most intensive bombing raids.

Ruins might also feel to some like a particularly apt place to reflect on some of the current difficulties facing the churches in Britain. Consolation that the story continues despite modern-day controversies, and a reminder that decline and renewal are part of the lifecycle.

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.