Trees and Mountains 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'm 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 Saint 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. 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.

When Danny Boyle chose an image to symbolise Britain in the Olympic opening ceremony,

he chose a tree on a hill.

And it was an image based on this place, Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.

This hill and the town around it are at the heart of a battle

that has rumbled on for 2,000 years between Christianity

and the older beliefs that existed before its arrival.

I'm setting out on a journey to understand why trees and mountains

have been such important symbols at the heart of our country's

spiritual history spanning different beliefs and thousands of years.

I'm in Glastonbury.

It's a shop window for all kinds of new age beliefs offering alternative

spiritual paths that traditional Christianity has supposedly failed to provide.

But it's also home to some of the most significant Christian sites in Britain.

There's a collision of beliefs here but there's nothing new in that, paganism and Christianity have been

rubbing up against each other for the best part of 2,000 years.

This town is overflowing with symbols...

..some centuries old...

..some boasting a slightly less conventional spiritual pedigree.

Glastonbury is the site of a modern-day battle in a very ancient war.

As Christianity's appeal declines, these alternative belief systems

are reoccupying this most enigmatic of English towns.

At the heart of pagan belief is a deep-felt connection with the earth

and nothing symbolises that better than trees and mountains.

Glastonbury has its tor which ticks that box, but it's also home

to the Glastonbury Thorn, amongst the most sacred trees in Britain.

The story goes that soon after Christ's death

one of his followers named Joseph of Arimathea visited Glastonbury.

He's said to have brought with him the chalice used at the Last Supper,

thus sparking the legend of the Holy Grail,

but during his visit he's also reputed to have planted his walking stick in the ground

causing the first Glastonbury Thorn to take root.

What sets these thorn trees apart is that they flower twice a year,

once at Christmas and once at Easter.

The original Glastonbury Thorn reputedly survived

until the 1650s when it was cut down by a Puritan soldier

who saw it as a lingering symbol of pagan superstition.

However, cuttings had been taken and here's one of them in the churchyard here at Glastonbury.

From these trees a replacement was re-planted on the original spot

where Joseph's staff is said to have taken root.

But in December 2010, this legendary tree at the heart of the Glastonbury story

was attacked again and all of its branches sawn off.

This sorry-looking specimen is now all that remains of the tree

on the site of the original Glastonbury Thorn.

The identity of the attacker is a mystery.

Although Christians and pagans both joined in mourning the loss of this tree,

the fact that somebody wanted to cut it down, shows how divisive these symbols can be.

Over there we see Glastonbury Tor, dominating the town.

For the Christians it's important because of the ruins of the church on the top of it,

for the pagans that is the Island of Avalon,

a mythical place that lies at the centre of their vision of Britain.

The relationship between pagans and Christians has always been an uneasy one.

Leaving Glastonbury behind I want to dig deeper into these tensions between Christianity and paganism.

The next stop on my journey is home to some trees which have long been sacred to both faiths,

but also boasts a symbolism that is impossible to miss.

This is Knowlton in Dorset,

a church set within an ancient earthen henge, which forms a huge circle around us.

This church building dates back to about the 12th century,

the earthen henge however is at least 4,500 years old.

It's a striking example of spiritual continuity in one place.

Building a church slap bang in the middle of an ancient pagan site was a bold move.

The Christians were making an empathic statement about their cultural dominance.

The siting of this church within a pagan henge was no accident,

but in fact part of a deliberate policy.

This is what Pope Gregory had to say on the matter.

"Concerning the matter of the English people.

"The temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed,

"but let the idols that are in them be destroyed.

"Let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples.

"Let altars be erected and relics placed there.

"For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be

"converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God,

"that that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed,

"may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God,

"may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed."

I've arranged to meet with Philip Carr-Gomm.

He's a druid who has also written about Britain's journey from paganism to Christianity.

So what kind of timescale would we be talking about?

We're really talking about from the 4th to the 7th century.

And by the 7th century the door was really closing and finally closed

between that pre-Christian culture and the Christian culture.

So, presumably, different areas were Christianised as it were at different times.

Yes, but interestingly enough not in the way that you'd expect.

You'd expect that Christianity would spread from the Holy Land up, from south to the north.

But, in fact, it worked in a completely different way,

it came down from the north,

from the Celtic Christianity up in the north, from Scotland, Iona,

coming down and then there was a sort of pincer movement

coming from St Augustine in Kent coming in from the east.

So that the last places to become Christian in Britain were Sussex and Hampshire.

-Really?

-Yes.

-Why was that then?

Well, because there was a vast stretch of land called the Waste of Undred

between the North Downs and the South Downs that was full of bears

and boars and brigands and pagans, forested and so on and it took a while to get through.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-Wow!

We're walking along the lip of a henge. What exactly is a henge? How would it have been used?

A henge is a sacred enclosure.

And we know it's designed to mark out a sacred space

-because the ditch is inside and not outside.

-Right.

And so you can't possibly defend a place like this,

because your attackers would be higher than you were down there.

So what it's saying is "we come in peace" in a way.

How much is recorded of the activities at sites like this?

We don't know. It's too early for that

-but what we do know is that in some of the henges there was a stone circle.

-Right.

In other ones there were ritual burials.

In other places there seems to have been nothing in the centre,

but they were probably observatories.

Who knows? We don't know, but perhaps they were like amphitheatres

and people could be sitting here watching.

Or great processions came and went through the various entrance ways,

forming in the centre some sort of ceremony.

The fact that this church has been built in the centre is a way of saying,

"Look, this is already a holy place. This is a sacred place. Let's build a church here."

And you can view a site like this either as one culture or one religion imposing itself upon another,

or you can look at it as a sort of evolution and development.

That is it starts off with a period of life with one type of spirituality and religion

and changes to another one.

One part of this site would be familiar to all the worshipers here, whether Christian or pagan,

this pair of yew trees on the perimeter of the henge.

Some yew tress grow to an incredibly ripe age,

which means they will have seen the pre-Christian as well as the Christian era.

-Thousands of years.

-Thousands of years.

-Really?

-Yes.

But these... Oh, actually, it's pretty old in there, isn't it?

When you get close up, it's older than you think.

-It's hard to tell.

-Cos they regenerate sometimes.

They regenerate and they can live...

-So it's just possible that this is a very, very old yew tree indeed.

-Really?

And that, of course, brings up the idea that this tree or perhaps its predecessors

were here before the coming of Christianity.

-Yeah.

-And has lived through that as a living being and is still alive today in the Christian era.

-Still very much alive?

-Still very much alive.

And now they're tying these beautiful clutties and they're prayer ties.

And they're tying these either because they're giving thanks

or they're tying them as a request,

symbolic of their wish to be healed or to achieve a particular goal.

Just who is tying these clutties is unclear.

This is one of the rituals which has grown out of the resurgence of pagan practises.

Christianity may have come and gone on this site but I wasn't expecting to come across such direct evidence

that earth magic has never truly gone away.

It gives the place an eerie feeling.

What's so interesting about this particular site

is you have the pre-Christian sense of sacredness

melded together with the Christian sense of the sacred

and both deeply connected to the landscape here.

And then people are coming here and here are these two guardian trees standing here

that people are intuitively or instinctively recognising as magical and sacred.

And, of course, they represent a gateway, the gateway between life and death,

the gateway between this world and the other world,

or between the material world and the spiritual world.

It's full of resonances as a symbol.

So when two trees come together at a gateway, it's a very profound symbol.

It's strange to think that even in this place

which has a spiritual heritage stretching back thousands of years,

one of the most enduring things are the yew trees.

But then these trees have always captivated our imaginations.

And I'm heading to Nevern in Pembrokeshire to see another example of a very unusual yew tree.

You can walk into many churchyards all over the country

and find these strange, ancient trees standing guard over the dead.

Not only do they live for hundreds, even thousands of years

but their leaves and berries are so poisonous they can easily kill you.

But this yew tree has a different characteristic, it appears to bleed.

It's a relatively recent phenomenon, but what does it mean?

According to some, it bleeds for a man wrongly hanged many years ago.

According to others, it will bleed until the world is at peace.

According to some Christians the red sap of this yew tree represents the blood of Christ.

The tree itself suggests the cross on which he was crucified.

But they can't all be right, or can they?

There's been some form of church on this site since the 6th century,

but the tree itself is around 600 years old.

No definitive scientific explanation for the bleeding has been established.

One theory is that it's caused by a fungal infection,

another that trapped rainwater is being coloured by sap.

In earlier times, when Christianity was the dominant intellectual force

this would have been described as a miracle.

Yet this in itself was a new way of looking at the world,

Christianity having elbowed aside earlier pagan interpretations of sites just like this.

The Book of Genesis, the earliest book in the Bible, contains numerous references to sacred trees.

In the middle of the Garden of Eden, we find the Tree of Life

and the Tree of Knowledge with its forbidden fruit.

Abraham later on travels to the great tree of Morre

and encounters God, near the great trees of Mamre.

Is it too fanciful to see here,

remnants of an earlier system of nature worship?

When the Judeo-Christian scriptures were first written,

they needed to acknowledge trees and nature because those were the dominant ideas in older religions.

They needed to find ways of acknowledging and then incorporating them.

As time has gone by mainstream Christianity

has moved away from the power of nature as a central part of its philosophy,

but nature still appeals to many people emotionally.

The church and graveyard here at Nevern are undoubtedly holy places in their own right,

but what the bleeding yew does is it allow us

to witness the genesis and development of a new holy site,

one that at the moment supports a multiplicity of interpretations,

some based on superstition, others based on religion.

But perhaps at root they're not that different.

Superstition and religion are both forms of belief,

it's just that religion enjoys a much higher status.

Many Christians find the bleeding yew tree at Nevern remarkable,

but to pagans all trees are important because of what they signify,

the link between the earth and the air.

Earth and air are two of the central elements in pagan beliefs

and trees represent a physical bridge between them.

And it is for this same reason that hills and mountains are also venerated.

As Christianity spread across Britain it had to confront paganism in its holy places.

Since pagans revered the highest peaks it was there that the Christians went to do battle.

And my next destination is the site of one such struggle,

a mountain in North Wales where a 6th century Christian missionary took on the devil himself.

This winter sunshine really brings out the epic qualities of this Snowdonia landscape

and it has an epic tale to tell.

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

And here on the slopes of Moelwyn Bach

he came to seek divine intervention to enable him to cast the decisive blow.

I'm meeting Twm Elias, a lecturer and author who knows all about that fateful meeting.

Can you tell me just what happened when St Twrog took on the pagans?

Well, when he arrived in this area as a Christian missionary

bringing Christianity to this particular district,

he found that the people locally were worshipping the devil,

that's according to the story at least,

which would have undoubtedly been the horned god, Cernunnos, the god of fertility.

And there was a big fight between Twrog and the devil

and during the intermission, they were quite civilised about it,

Twrog went for a walk up the top of the mountain at the top there and there he cheated.

Cos he prayed for divine help now.

And then an angel came and gave Twrog terrific strength.

Well, Twrog became very, very strong suddenly and grabbed

hold of a mighty stone and threw the stone, hurled the stone through the air

and it came down and landed right in between the hoofs of the devil

who then realised that his number was up, no point in fighting any longer.

And as you would expect the devil then swore and cursed,

as a devil would do, obviously, swished his tail, opened his wings

and flew away eastwards from here and he didn't land until he came to England.

And that's where he is to this very day, apparently.

-HE LAUGHS

-Well, wherever the devil may be, his stone is still here.

Twrog's stone is still here. And here it is. This is the evidence.

This proves to you that tale is true because there we are, indisputable evidence.

Whatever the truth or otherwise of the story,

it certainly represents a real friction at one point

between Christians and pagans, doesn't it?

Yes, certainly. And the point was there would have been a holy site at this point, a pagan holy site,

because of course you're by the river here and this would have been a ford.

And very often you find a stone marking a ford.

The river represented a boundary between not only this world and the next, the water and the land,

but it was also a very important tribal boundary. And so a ford would have been a place to do battle.

And in this particular incidence it was a battle

between Twrog the Christian and the devil representing the old faith.

Although Christianity won the day when St Twrog defeated the devil,

it could be argued that in other ways pagan traditions infiltrated the Christian ways of doing things.

Yeah. Well, they certainly influenced the siting of the Christian church at least.

It would have had to be here, because if it was half a mile down the road, then of course people

would come there in the middle of the night to perform the pagan ceremonies.

But here the best way to neutralise it was to put a church

splat on top of the site, you know.

And, therefore, that church then took on, I suppose, the value and sacred nature of the site itself

and then grafted Christianity onto it,

doing away with the old pagan branch, as it were.

Once again we find Christianity setting up camp on top of earlier pagan sites

to stop them being used by the old religion.

Across the country this led to churches being built on top of many hills and mountains,

literally staking out the moral high ground.

Such hilltop churches are commonly dedicated to the Archangel Michael.

The iconic church tower on Glastonbury Tor is dedicated to him,

as is St Michael's Mount near the tip of Cornwall,

a place where the fiery angel is said to have appeared

to some frightened fishermen around the year 500.

And then there's this place, in the middle of Cornwall,

a rocky crag that a mediaeval hermit turned into a dramatic cliff-top chapel.

It may seem an odd place to choose to withdraw from society because it's such an obvious landmark,

but he could live a holy and exemplary life here,

dispensing wisdom from on high perhaps, just as Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount.

This cell stands in splendid isolation,

like a spiritual fortress watching over the surrounding countryside.

This tiny chapel clinging to the top of a rocky outcrop

near Bodmin in Cornwall dates back to 1409.

Precise details of the medieval hermits who dwelt here are now lost,

but it does provide one of the most striking views of all of the sites I have visited.

In fact, it is such an arresting site it was used as a location in the Omen horror films.

This is actually quite apt. In the Book of Revelations, St Michael is depicted

as leader of God's army during the titanic battle with the anti-Christ.

He is supposed to have beaten the devil's forces and driven them from the heavens.

Our ancestors prayed that in their hour of need St Michael would flutter down from the clouds

like a butterfly to find a convenient high point on which to land.

But there was nothing butterfly-like about St Michael.

He's always portrayed as a warrior angel, leading the forces of light against the forces of darkness.

And once again in Christian tradition we find it's tinged with a sense of conflicting belief.

Were the mountains the last refuges of the old pagan gods,

who needed St Michael to come with has sword in order to put them to flight?

It seems that we can never truly embrace the natural landscape

without bumping up against earlier belief systems.

It's no surprise that later Christians

felt that the country's conversion from paganism was unfinished business.

In the 17th century, many decided it was time to finish the job once and for all.

We saw in Glastonbury how the Puritans destroyed the thorn tree

because of a whiff of pagan idolatry,

but the Puritans were not alone in this obsession. This is Pendle Hill in Lancashire

There's one man who more than anyone tried to rid his religion

of any lingering traces of ancient superstitions,

and in the process founded perhaps the most stripped down Christian movement of all time.

We know them as the Society of Friends or the Quakers

and they did away with all the rituals and sacraments that mark out other churches.

Their founder's name was George Fox and in 1652, he came here to Pendle Hill.

On a much sunnier afternoon than today, in early summer,

George Fox was "moved by the Lord" as he put it, to come up here.

From the top of the hill, he had a vision of human souls ripe for harvest,

as real to him as the patchwork of fields behind us there.

As he recorded in his diary,

"From the top of the hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered".

Now, it's ironic that even George Fox,

a man who put such emphasis on inner transformation and the avoidance of all outward rituals,

should be impelled to come up a mountain, as many others have before him, in order to receive a vision.

George Fox and his followers rejected virtually all the trappings of religion.

Quakers have no ceremonies of baptism, their meeting houses have no altars,

and their services are not conducted by priests.

Fox himself even refused to use the names of the days of the week or the months of the year

that derived from pagan gods.

Quakers set out to rid themselves of anything which could be construed as pagan idolatry

and yet the very place that inspired their leader to develop the Quaker movement

is one that would be equally powerful to a pagan or a Christian.

The landscape has been a battleground between pagans and Christians in our early history,

and indeed nature features in many faiths, but its greatness lies in the fact that it belongs to no one.

Nature is non-denominational, trees and mountains are beyond dogma,

they inspire within us feelings that are mystical and difficult to explain.

But maybe then that's the point, because nature is so much greater than we are

and it's in places like this that many of us feel that we come closest to the divine.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd