Ruins Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain's Holiest Places

Britain is home to many of the most beautiful holy places in the world.

Our religious heritage and architecture is more varied than virtually anywhere else on earth.

My name is Ifor ap Glyn and I am on a journey to explore the best of Britain's holy sites

and to uncover the rich and diverse history of our spiritual landscape.

I want to know how these places came to be,

discover what they reveal about the people who worshipped at them,

and explore why they continue to fascinate us today.

This place is incredible.

My journey will take me to towering mountain hideaways...

It was here that St Twrog took on the pagan forces of evil.

..icy healing pools...

I'm not sure what effect this is having on me,

but it is certainly having an effect!

...and the graves of long departed saints...

There's something quite unsettling about this relic.

I'll search out islands where the faithful seek refuge from the world.

I'll wander ruins steeped in history...

His congregation were roused to come here and rip down the rich trappings of this cathedral.

..and descend into caves which have been sacred for thousands of years.

Wow!

From the divine to the unexpected, join me on a journey

to the unforgettable corners of our country,

the landscapes that make the soul soar.

I'm in Cambridgeshire on a glorious autumn morning.

This is the start of a journey to explore some of the most

atmospheric and best-loved holy sites in Britain -

ruins.

I want to understand why we are drawn to them and why we feel it's

so important to preserve them, long after their religious use is over.

There are few things more beautiful than the decaying grandeur

of a ruin, and this place in the grounds of Wimpole Hall is perhaps the perfect example -

set amid rolling countryside,

these magnificent arches tell us immediately that this once was

a monastic institution fortified against the world. You can almost imagine

the cowled figure of a monk flitting away from our gaze at one of those empty windows.

DEVOTIONAL MONASTIC MUSIC

But there's just one small catch - the entire thing is actually a fake.

This is not an abandoned monastery.

It was never a house of worship or a place of pilgrimage.

It is a folly, a fake ruin, a piece of theatrical landscape art,

that was actually built by a wealthy landowner in 1769.

This folly is by no means a one-off.

There are about 50 such sham ruins on 18th century estates

throughout Britain.

They were inspired by the fading grandeur of ruined abbeys

dotted around the country.

But this passion for ruins is still with us today.

We have a very British fascination with ruins.

Our current Romantic notions of the ivy-clad ruin date back to the 18th century.

But our obsession with the glorious past goes back even further than that.

Is it just nostalgia, or is it something in fact much deeper that

makes our ruins some of the best protected holy sites in Britain?

I'm heading to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast to visit

one of the most famous ruins, not just in Britain but across the world.

Caught between the moors and the sea, this ruin, epic in scale,

helped change the way we define beauty....

..and in the process gave birth to a gothic nightmare.

DEVOTIONAL CHORAL SINGING

If there's one place that encapsulates the otherworldly qualities of ruins,

it's here on the cliff tops at Whitby in North Yorkshire.

This Saxon foundation was one of the most important Christian

sites in the early mediaeval period,

and it was run by one of the most important women in church history - St Hilda.

During her time here in the 7th century this place saw

the writing of the first hymns in English,

the training of a number of bishops, and it hosted an important conference or synod

that unified the different religious traditions in England.

Founded by Anglo-Saxon King Oswy in 657, Whitby Abbey

had a significant religious history before the 16th century reformation.

But when Henry VIII broke with Rome, turning Britain from Catholicism

to Protestantism, the abbey was dissolved and allowed to go to ruin.

Ironically, this building was to have a greater

impact on the cultural life of our country after it became a ruin.

To explain the history and significance of these ruins,

I'm meeting John Coates, an English Literature academic.

This place has been in a state of ruin for almost half its history, hasn't it?

Yes, destroyed first by the Vikings in 867, I think,

and not rebuilt till 1078, and then of course destroyed after 1539.

There is a poem by Sir John Denham where he talks about

that if someone looked at the ruins, they'd think some foreign invader had sacked the country.

But I think for a lot of people the monasteries were just

the places where you quarried stone.

You took the nice square dressed stone

and put it into your cottage and you left the, you know - the sort of tracery, and the...

-..the ribs.

-And the ribs.

and that helps to explain the look of the monastic ruin, doesn't it?

What happened in the 18th century to change people's sensibilities,

and their attitudes towards these ruins?

Well, it's hugely complicated, but there are two key words, really.

One is picturesque, and the other is sublime.

And they're the two new aesthetic categories.

What was the dominant aesthetic at that time, then?

Well, it had been order and regularity.

Gardens with straight lines, demonstrating man's dominance over nature,

and I suppose the big model is the gardens at Versailles.

But there is a reaction against that.

The picturesque becomes the dominant concept. There's a man called

the Reverend William Gilpin. He wrote three essays on picturesque beauty

and he talks about the value of ruins as a means of contemplation,

a means of spiritual development, and so on - so that's the picturesque.

And the sublime which is connected with fear.

You know, there's a sense that in some minor way we're being physically threatened.

You know, great mountains, torrents, dark places,

ruins - anything that's got some element of awe and strangeness about it, and he

definitely suggests that the sublime is more powerful than the beautiful.

That feeds very much I think into the growing gothic, the gothic novel.

Very often set in ruined or half ruined mansions,

secret passages, dark chambers - above all, secrets from the past.

The idea of Gothic was starting to take root during the 19th century

but it was a visit to Whitby by author and actors' agent

Bram Stoker that was to forever link the movement to these ruins.

Whitby became the inspiration

and setting for much of Gothic's most famous novel - Dracula.

When exactly was Bram Stoker around Whitby?

Well, in the 1890s. I mean,

he gathered some of the material for Dracula from the old

library in Whitby, including the name Dracula itself, and the wrecking of

the ship. There was a ship, a Russian ship called the Dimitri -

in Dracula, it's the Demeter.

To what extent can we see the ruins here in Whitby as inspiration

for Bram Stoker's Dracula?

I think you could probably see it in terms of the weight and the power of the past.

You get that feeling in the 18th century that the past has a kind of terror

simply because it's so strange. It's so alien.

And I think that feeds into Dracula, the figure of Dracula himself.

It's hard to overstate the impact of Bram Stoker's creation.

Over 170 Dracula films have been made, along with countless

other re-imaginings of the basic vampire idea.

Even today, one of the most successful film franchises - Twilight -

is merely a re-working of 19th century gothic.

Halloween has become a major secular festival,

with the legend of Dracula as one of its cornerstones.

The feelings which these ruins evoked in Bram Stoker have proved

enduringly unsettling and intriguing.

The blend of death, sex and beautiful doomed youth

are now one of the mainstays of popular culture.

It's ironic that the Protestant Reformation, the revolution

that was intended to effect a complete break with the mediaeval past and end our

reverence for relics, in fact created hundreds of new architectural relics.

Holy places like this may have acquired a different resonance,

but they've lost none of their power to awe and inspire us.

Yet our celebrated taste for the gothic is just one

aspect of a much older history of ruins.

Whilst Gothic and the romantic idealising of ruins

in the 19th century may have felt like a radical idea,

nothing is ever really new.

History forever repeats itself, and the nostalgic pull of the ruin

has been around for much longer than you might think.

I am heading to south Wales and the crumbing remains of a far

earlier empire.

This is Caerwent, one of the major towns of Roman Britain.

Its name, Caerwent, means fortress of Gwent.

This was a regional capital for the area,

and although these walls are over 1,700 years old they're still

very impressive - they still convey a strong sense of imperial might.

Caerwent was founded by the Romans in AD 75,

and is one of the best preserved Roman sites in Northern Europe.

This allows us to understand what would have taken place here during its Roman heyday.

You can still clearly make out the remains of the temple on the old

main street, although to whom it was dedicated is no longer known.

Behind me is the inner sanctum of the temple at Caerwent.

When we think about Roman spiritual life, we tend to think of them

worshipping a pantheon of gods such as Mars, Jupiter, Apollo and so on.

We sometimes forget that in its latter years the Roman empire was a Christian empire.

And as a result, temples such as this were either

converted for use as churches, or more often than not, simply abandoned.

When the Roman empire went into decline, the indigenous population

of Britain didn't have the skills to maintain buildings on this scale.

Before long, they were tumbling into disrepair

and not long after, the allure of the ruin was starting to weave its magic.

In the middle ages, an Anglo-Saxon monk wrote a poem entitled 'The Ruin'.

It's an eerie precursor to the way the romantics would

fall for the strange beauty of decay many hundreds of years later.

"Wondrously ornate is the stone of this wall, shattered by fate.

"Those who should repair it, the multitudes,

"Were fallen to the ground.

"The site is fallen into ruin, reduced to heaps."

It's clear the Anglo-Saxons felt the same way

about the ruins of the Roman Empire as we now feel about the ruins at

Whitby - strange, slightly unnerving, but also full of nostalgic promise.

This passion for the fading glory of old Roman architecture led to

ruins gaining a whole new lease of life.

The oldest parts of the church of St Stephen

and St Tathan at Caerwent date back to 560 AD.

As new settlements sprang up in the old Roman towns, building

materials from the ruins were often incorporated in the fabric

of the new buildings, such as this church here at Caerwent.

A cynic might say they were just being architectural jackdaws

taking advantage of the decorative stonework, but it was more

than that - by incorporating stones from the Roman buildings within buildings such as this,

they were also appropriating some of the spiritual prestige of the Christian Roman Empire -

they were seeking a continuity with the past.

Ruins of great buildings don't generally happen by accident.

They mark seismic shifts in our country's history.

The fall of the Roman empire was one such shift,

but 1,000 years later the shift from Catholicism to Protestantism

was to leave a far deeper scar on the British landscape.

This is the ruin of St Andrew's cathedral.

It was founded to house the relics of St Andrew, one of Jesus's

disciples and Patron Saint of Scotland.

All over Britain, the 16th century reformation saw

the replacing of a Catholic theology with a Protestant one -

monks had no place in this new order and abbeys were dissolved.

But here in Scotland, they took things a step further and got

rid of the bishops too, making cathedrals like this redundant.

According to the Gospels,

when Jesus approached the fishermen on the shores of Lake Galilee,

it was Andrew who first agreed to become a disciple.

So St Andrew can be considered the first-ever follower of Christ,

and this cathedral is said to be his final resting place.

But when the reformation took hold, even this impressive pedigree

was no shield against the mob.

In 1559, Protestant reformer John Knox preached such a fiery sermon

in a nearby church that his congregation were roused to come here

and rip down the rich trappings of the cathedral -

the symbols of popish worship - and they didn't stop there.

This place hasn't peacefully crumbled to its present state -

it would have looked pretty much like this as early as 1600 -

a stark testimony to the destructive zeal of the Protestant reformers.

In much of Britain, the passions of the reformation have gradually faded.

But that is not entirely the case here.

For people on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide,

the Reformation was about far more than buildings.

It was about cultural identity, bound up with the most deeply held convictions.

And on the streets of Scotland's major cities you can still see

one side or the other acting out long-established rituals.

This march is the Protestant Apprentice Boys parading through the centre of Glasgow.

But the city also plays host to very

similar marches by those from the Catholic tradition.

During the five-month summer marching season, there are up

to 1,000 such marches throughout Scotland.

For a church dedicated to a saint as important as Saint Andrew -

Christ's first apostle,

and the patron saint of Scotland - it's surprising to find that the

Scots don't make more of these ruins - but then, maybe that's more honest.

These ruins certainly enshrine a religious difference.

It would be a shame if they also enshrined religious division.

In many ways, the Reformation

and the bitterness and division it represents

reminds us of the worst aspects of our religious instincts.

But with my next location I am off to see a ruin which shows us at our best.

This is Coventry Cathedral.

The oldest part of the cathedral was built in the 14th century.

It's not a ruin of the Reformation and didn't inspire a literary movement,

but because of the destruction rained upon it during World War Two,

it holds a special place in our affections.

The ruins here at Coventry Cathedral are amongst Britain's most recent,

and because of that, most poignant.

The bombing that destroyed this building occurred within

living memory and Coventry's oldest residents can recall only too

well the human cost associated with that night in November 1940.

AIR RAID SIREN

515 planes attacked Coventry on the 14th of November that year.

And tragically for the people of the city, things could not have

gone better for the German raiders.

By the end of the night, 4,000 homes were destroyed.

The city centre was obliterated, and the Cathedral a burned-out shell.

Roughly 568 people were killed,

although an exact death toll was never established.

The Nazis were delighted with their night's work and even coined

a new word to describe the wholesale destruction of an enemy town.

Henceforth they referred to anywhere that suffered this

fate as having been "Coventried".

It would be understandable after suffering such a terrible act

of violence if this city had adopted its shattered cathedral as a symbol

of defiance or even triumphalism once the war was finally won.

But the bombing set Coventry and its Cathedral on a very different path,

a path that began almost immediately after their night of destruction.

After the bombing, the cathedral's stonemason noticed that

two charred mediaeval roof timbers had fallen in the shape of a cross,

so he set them up against this wall here originally,

on a pile of rubble, and that cross is still on display.

A local priest found three mediaeval nails and he fashioned them into a cross

which still stands to this day on the altar in the new cathedral.

After the war, similar crosses were sent as a gesture of reconciliation to Berlin, Kiel,

and Dresden - cities that had also suffered during the war.

From the very start, there was a strong emphasis on reconciliation

and forgiveness, as well as remembrance.

It lends this ruin a real sense of purpose,

and this was enhanced yet further by some clever architecture.

When planning the restoration of the site, it was decided to attach

the new cathedral to the shattered remains of the old,

and the decision has been a triumph.

The interplay between the old and the new is what gives this place its unique atmosphere -

one without the other would not have the same power.

This is not just a war memorial -

this is still an integral part of the cathedral.

This is still hallowed ground. The two parts - the old and the new -

constitute one whole.

The decision to keep the ruins and to continue to worship here ensures

that not only do we never forget, but also that we continue to forgive.

It's in a place like this that our experience of ruins becomes personal.

And for me the final destination is most definitely personal.

This is an area my family originate from

and this is a ruin that holds a very special place in my heart.

I'm on my way to the abbey at Strata Florida near Aberystwyth in Ceredigion.

The abbey here was founded in 1154,

and it was a major centre of learning.

Its remote location did not spare it from the Reformation.

Following its dissolution, the abbey's walls were mined for stone to build a local manor house.

Over the next 300 years the site was gradually reclaimed by nature and all but lost.

In the 1860s, whilst building a railway line in the area,

an engineer named Steven Williams became fascinated with the site

and started a large-scale excavation, uncovering the ruins we see today.

He hoped it might become a major tourist destination for wealthy Victorians.

Sadly this was not to be.

The late 19th century was a time of economic hardship and much of the

local population sought to escape the grinding poverty on the new railway lines,

some going as far afield as Australia and Patagonia.

Ceredigion has been described as the Ireland of Wales because of the massive outflow of population

during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Some went to the south Wales coalfields, some went to the United States.

In the case of my own family, most went to London.

But the connection with this place remained strong

both in life and in death.

A cursory inspection of the gravestones around us

reveal - even if you don't speak Welsh - just how many people were brought

back here for burial from 'Llundain', which is Welsh for London.

Funeral services would be held on the platforms at Paddington.

Welsh hymns would resound beneath the station roof, and then the coffin would be placed in the train

to be brought back here for burial.

And that is how many of the dead around us here

would have been brought to their final resting place.

DEVOTIONAL CHORAL SINGING

And amongst those Welshmen who came back from London to be buried

here are many members of my own family - aunts, uncles, cousins.

My journey across Britain to our holiest ruins has made me

realise that what we are drawn to with ruins is the things that

are lost, be that some part of our history

or those that we have loved.

Implicit in every ruin is a scattering, a breaking apart,

and maybe that's why this place appeals to me so much,

as a child of the Welsh diaspora,

because just as time has gradually opened up this old abbey church to the elements,

in the same way, my own family have been blown in all directions away

from this place - but something still remains, something still draws us back.

Perhaps the secret of ruins is this -

just as individual family members may come and go, the "idea"

of "family" remains, and in the same way, although the Christian

institution that once stood here is now in ruins, the "idea" of it still remains.

Ideas can never die.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd