Islands 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 St Turog took on the pagan forces of evil.

'..Icy healing pools...'

I'm not sure what effect

this is having on me, but it's 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.'

Oh, 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 the Lake District. This is Derwentwater

and I've picked a very wet day to go rowing.

This is the first leg of my journey

to explore some of the holy islands dotted around Britain.

I'd like to understand what it is about an island

that has drawn the devout throughout history.

It turns out this may not be as simple a question

as it first appears.

We tend to think of islands as a place to get away from it all,

and that's an idea that's deep-rooted in our psyche.

In many spiritual traditions, man would go into the wilderness

in order to be nearer to God,

in order to escape from the normal realm of human beings,

in order to contemplate, in order, perhaps, to gain personal insight.

And where better to seek out that kind of spiritual haven

than on an island?

This is St Herbert's Isle.

St Herbert came here to live as a hermit in the 7th century.

Since the earliest years of Christianity,

there had been a tradition for monks to remove themselves from society

in search of solitude in the deserts of the Middle East.

As there were no deserts in 7th century Britain,

many of our would-be hermits instead chose

one of the 1,000 or so islands

around the coastline and lakes of Britain.

And this is the one where St Herbert chose to make his home.

It would be nice to think

that this wall is part of St Herbert's original cell,

but it's actually part of a later building,

in all probability a chapel that would have been erected

to accommodate the pilgrims who came here to honour his name.

St Herbert would have lived a simple life here,

getting all his daily needs from the lake - water to drink, fish to eat,

thus leaving him free

to spend the rest of his time in contemplation and prayer.

St Herbert only left the island once a year

in order to visit his great friend,

St Cuthbert, the abbot of Lindisfarne, to make his confession.

St Herbert valued their friendship so highly,

he prayed that he might be allowed to die

on the same day as his confessor,

fearing that otherwise, his grief would be unbearable.

His wish was granted, as, extraordinarily,

both men died on their respective islands on 20th March 687.

It's a touching story, but it hints at something much deeper

than just two men with a yearning for solitude.

Here we have two devout and learned people who chose to live

a very specific kind of life in a very specific kind of place.

It seems to me that this is perhaps the real pulling power of islands.

Even on a day like today,

this island is still one of the most beautiful places in Britain,

and it's easy to see

how being surrounded by the glories of creation

might be conducive to a greater spiritual awareness,

but what I'd like to know is this - is there more to islands

than natural beauty alone?

My next location is some 250 miles south of the Lake District,

so I'm back on the motorway, somewhere I've spent

a lot of time during my journey around our holy places.

But for once, this feels quite fitting.

I've come to see motorway driving as a modern form of hermitage,

one of the few opportunities life provides us to be alone.

On the motorway, we enter an intermediate world,

halfway between where we've been and where we're heading,

and it transpires that that was very much part

of the ancient allure of islands.

This is Hereford Cathedral. It's 50 miles from the sea

and not an island in sight,

but what it does have is something that gives us an intriguing insight

into the way our ancestors thought about islands.

I'm here to see the largest surviving medieval map in Britain,

the Mappa Mundi.

My guide is Canon Chris Pullin.

The map itself is not something

that the modern eye could readily recognise.

Can you interpret it for us?

Yes, well, one thing, of course, is that it faces east.

East is at the top, not north.

So imagining the thing on its side, as it were,

where would we find Britain?

Well, Britain is just there, in the bottom left hand quarter.

I see! Sort of scrunched up.

Yes, well, one of the things about the map is,

it's been presented within a circle because that was a perfect shape,

so things have been distorted to fit within the circle,

and not just to fit within the circle

but to have Jerusalem placed at the very centre of the map.

And that's another distortion because the Holy Land is presented

out of all proportion to its actual size in the world.

It's very large in the map there,

but then it's very significant, and that's the reason why.

It's geography governed by divine principles, rather than...

It certainly is. This isn't a map to tell you

how to get from one place to another.

It's really a map to tell you about what's important

for a human journey through life. That's what it's about.

The map was created by 13th century scholars

and what strikes you immediately is just how many islands there are.

The ones in the centre are real islands

like the Balearics in the Mediterranean,

but it's the other ones on the map which are drawing my attention.

Around the edges of the map, we tend to have islands

and lands that are known about through legend

and through ancient writings,

so down here we have the Happy Islands, the Fortunate Islands,

where fruit just fell into your hand...

-A kind of earthly paradise?

-Yes, that's right.

And of these mythical islands,

there's one which all of us have probably heard of

but never before seen on a map - Eden.

They believed it was somewhere, but quite where, no-one could say.

But it was somewhere that was thought to be unapproachable,

either because of terrible seas and currents and things

that would prevent you,

but also because of this wall of fire

that surrounded it, which would mean you couldn't get there.

And of course, you see directly above it

that we have Christ sitting in majesty

and judging the souls of the living and the dead,

those on his left going into the jaws of hell,

and those on his right being received by angels into heaven.

And so worldly Paradise is very close to where on the map,

we see the heavenly realm depicted.

What this map shows us is that in medieval times,

islands weren't just seen as beautiful places

to get away from it all,

but as somewhere that existed between this world and the next,

spiritual stepping stones, to give you safe passage to heaven.

With this thought in mind,

I'm heading to another medieval island hideaway

to explore the story of a woman who rejected society

after her marriage came to a dramatic end.

This is Llanddwyn, off Anglesey in North Wales, a lonely headland

which becomes an island when cut off from the mainland at high tide.

There's a cold, melancholic quality

to the beauty of Llanddwyn island today, but then that's quite fitting

because the saint that the island was named after came here first

because she had a broken heart.

Llanddwyn means the church of St Dwynwen,

and as the tide begins to recede,

I cadge a lift from the island's warden in order to cross over

and tell the fantastical story

of what happened when her marriage to Maelon hit the rocks.

Dwynwen was a fifth century princess

whose marriage to Maelon had broken down,

so she prayed to God for assistance

and received it in the form of a magic potion delivered by an angel,

but when she gave the potion to Maelon, he was turned into stone.

This was an outcome a little bit more drastic

than that which she had envisaged,

so she prayed to God once more that Maelon be restored to life.

His reaction at that point is not recorded,

but by then their marriage was definitely over.

Dwynwen, freed from the tribulations of their union,

was able to retreat to this island here

where she devoted the rest of her days

to a life of prayer and devotion as a hermit.

Dwynwen was trying to turn her back on her troubles

by escaping to a place on the margins of society,

somewhere that was still of this world, but only just.

Her dream of a normal, happy marriage was in tatters,

and so she chose something completely different.

Living alone on an island seemed the perfect answer,

but things didn't turn out quite as she had expected.

Although unable to find love herself,

it was Dwynwen's wish that God work through her

to protect true lovers everywhere,

and so in Wales she's become the patron saint of Welsh lovers.

Her saint's day on 25th January

is celebrated each year as a kind of Welsh Valentine's Day,

and it was on that day that I asked my wife to marry me.

So I for one still have reason to be very grateful to St Dwynwen.

It's ironic that a hermit who embraced solitude on an island

should become a patron saint of love, the ultimate in togetherness.

But throughout her time here,

Dwynwen received a steady stream of petitioners seeking advice.

The poet John Donne wrote in the 17th century,

that "no man is an island, entire of itself,

"every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main".

By choosing this island,

Dwynwen had given herself the best of both worlds -

at high tide, she could satisfy her need to be alone.

The rest of the time, she too

could entertain the pilgrims who came to visit her,

becoming "a piece of the continent, a part of the main".

It all seems very appealing,

a life half in this world, half in another,

but I wonder what the reality would be?

Most of the holy islands around Britain

have been long abandoned, but not all of them.

I've come to Scotland to visit a modern day community

led by monks and nuns.

I'm on my way to Eilean Molaise, or Holy Isle,

just off the coast of Arran.

But the spiritual tradition that prevails here today

is not one that you might expect to find in Scotland.

This island has been a religious retreat

since a Christian monk settled here in the sixth century.

But since the 1990s,

Holy Isle has been home to a Tibetan Buddhist retreat.

It's not an obvious location for a spiritual tradition

that originated in a landlocked country in the Himalayas,

but the Lama of a Buddhist order bought it

after claiming to have seen a vision of the island in a dream.

When he finally met the Christian owner,

it transpired she was keen

to pass the island on to a new spiritual community,

and so sold it to the Buddhists at a favourable price.

I've been invited here by Choden,

a former monk who now runs the island,

and he explains why people today want to come here.

For genuine spiritual realisation,

one needs to really go away for a time

to deepen one's practice and re-enter the world.

And in order for spiritual work to happen,

you often need the right conditions,

a place that's set back from the world, but not too far.

The reason for this

is that you're trying to set up somewhere that's special and precious

so that when people enter that, they feel that they're entering something

that's a different kind of energy, a different kind of feel.

In the Tibetan tradition,

they use the term mandala,

and mandala is where you set up a sacred space

which has a clear boundary,

a place you enter into to enable you to touch something more deeply.

As we know, often living a very busy lifestyle,

it's not easy to touch the deep inner wisdom of one's being

because, you know, you're constantly...doing things

and stressed and whatever.

So an island is a good place to...

So an island, yeah, I know this isn't the tradition of Tibet,

but this fits the idea of a sacred mandala very well.

Is it difficult being in a retreat on an island?

It is. It's actually quite tough living here and practising here.

The reality is that when you're in a place like this

and all the distractions are taken away,

you start running more into deeper aspects of the mind

and in a way,

many of the things one's been running away from most of one's life

start appearing - one's anxieties, one's fears, one's sadness,

many things that we might have put the lid on

start appearing in Shangri-La!

And the whole idea of mandala is to create a space

that's safe and protected so that the things we've been putting a lid on

have a chance to come up

and we have a chance to work with them.

That's really what retreat is about

and that's really what meditation practice is about.

And that is what this place is about, really.

What the community here have created

is a place to get away from the distractions of the world,

leaving them alone with their thoughts,

even if that is tougher than it first appears.

But the Lama who bought the island

didn't want this place to be exclusively for Buddhists.

He didn't want the Arran people to feel

that we were just taking the island from them.

-Right.

-So this would also be open to Christians

and people of all religions or none,

as long as they keep to the five golden rules,

which are the basic ethics of the Buddhist tradition.

And what are they?

Which are not stealing, not lying,

not killing, not drinking or smoking, so we're very strict on that,

and maintaining healthy sexual relations.

That doesn't mean you can't have sex,

it means just that one engages in sexual relations that are healthy

and don't harm. As long as people follow that, then anybody can come.

I've never meditated before,

but Choden's invited me to join one of their sessions.

After running through a quick mental checklist

to make sure I haven't broken any of the five golden rules -

well, not recently anyway - I agree to give it a go.

So, welcome.

-Come and join our community of meditation.

-Thank you.

The first thing is to sit comfortably,

maybe you're not used to this,

and then the actual practice is

using the breathing and just becoming aware of the breath

as we breathe in and out,

and every time your mind wanders away,

just notice that and bring your attention back to the breathing.

'The people on retreat meditate like this for an hour

'and three quarters every day.

'But for a beginner like me, three minutes is more than enough.'

So how was that? Are you enlightened yet?

I think it'll take a bit longer!

It was interesting to just...

to, er...

..absent yourself.

What did you actually notice happening in that short meditation?

I was thinking about breathing.

-Yeah.

-I was studying a spot on the floor there.

It reminded me of when I was a boy with appendicitis

and I used to focus on a spot on the floor of the bathroom

to make the pain go away.

And then I thought "I'm not supposed to be thinking about that",

and I came back to the spot on the floor here,

and breathed a bit more.

So a lot of it's quite mundane, which is what the path is,

and I think a lot of it's just realising what the mind's doing,

moment by moment.

They call it the monkey mind,

becoming aware of the monkey mind.

As I leave Arran, one thing that occurs to my monkey mind is this -

here in Britain, we're all islanders.

We live at a remove from the European landmass.

Perhaps this is another reason why we're drawn

so strongly to the peripheries, and why some of the most

important holy places in the country are on islands.

And my next location is quite possibly

the most famous holy place in Britain,

and somewhere I've always wanted to visit.

Wow.

This is the halfway point on the causeway to Lindisfarne.

This road is submerged by the sea, apparently,

for half of every day.

You have to be careful with the tides, because apparently,

at least once a month, somebody gets trapped on his way over.

But the true pilgrims used to walk across the mudflats

following the line of those poles set out over there.

If they got caught by the tide, they'd have to scamper up

into those little wooden tower things

and then wait for the tide to turn.

The monastic community here on Lindisfarne

was established in the 7th century

as an offshoot of the Celtic Christian community on Iona,

off the west coast of Scotland.

It was part of a mission to re-establish Christianity

throughout England, and this island soon became

the spiritual capital of the north.

The island is now a major tourist attraction.

It's home to a picturesque castle

and it's where the sumptuous Lindisfarne gospels were created.

But it wasn't these things that really put Lindisfarne on the map.

What really catapulted Lindisfarne to its spiritual pre-eminence

was the appointment of the sixth abbot, St Cuthbert.

Many miracles were attributed to him,

but he was also an astute leader of the church

at a difficult time in its history.

St Cuthbert is one of the most important figures

in the history of Christianity in England.

His diplomatic talents held the church and country together

as it moved from Celtic Christianity to Roman Catholicism,

but his appeal goes beyond mere church politics.

It was St Cuthbert that was so beloved by St Herbert,

whose island we visited earlier on Derwentwater,

and St Cuthbert appears to have inspired this level of devotion

in everyone he met.

Long after his death, St Cuthbert was venerated by people

as varied as King Alfred the Great,

the Viking raiders who settled in Britain

and the Norman invaders in 1066.

He was one of the few saints to come out of the Reformation

with his reputation intact,

and in the years after his death his legend grew and grew

until he was eventually named the patron saint of the North.

But it's when you come here to Lindisfarne

that you get a hint of what an unusual man he really was.

Even here on this tidal island,

St Cuthbert was sometimes overwhelmed

by the cares of the world and the demands of his flock.

At times like that, he would retreat

to a little rocky outcrop just offshore,

which we now know as St Cuthbert's Isle.

There, he would immerse himself in the sea and pray.

There's a lovely story

that when he came out of the sea after praying,

two otters would bound up and breathe on his feet

in order to warm them up and try and rub him dry with their fur.

Without doubt, St Cuthbert was very much at home with nature

and imposed what might be described

as the world's first wildlife conservation laws.

He banned the hunting of seabirds and the collecting of their eggs.

Eventually, even St Cuthbert's Isle

couldn't give him the solitude that he craved.

People would stand on the shore of the mainland and shout at him,

asking for advice. So he retreated to the island of Inner Farne

over there on the horizon,

and that's where he died in the year 687.

The place where St Cuthbert chose to live and die

is as bleak and wild a spot

as you could possibly hope to eke out an existence.

It was very much in the tradition

of being halfway between this world and the next,

and should have been the perfect haven from worldly concerns.

But as his followers were to discover soon after his death,

this was no early paradise.

Lindisfarne Abbey's island location

ultimately proved to be something of a mixed blessing.

Its isolation may have helped

to turn it into a spiritual and creative powerhouse

packed with treasures, but it also made it a rich target

that was extremely vulnerable to attack from the sea.

The first recorded Viking raid took place here in 793

and further raids eventually forced the evacuation of the island.

As the monks abandoned the abbey,

it returned to the state of natural solitude

that had attracted them in the first place.

The Viking attacks were brutal.

They turned Lindisfarne into a mournful place

of martyrdom and death.

But oddly, that too is part of what a holy island should be.

For the monks of Lindisfarne,

the island had became their gateway to the next world.

I have one final place to visit

on my voyage around Britain's holy isles -

Bardsey Island, off the northwest tip of Wales.

In many traditions, crossing the waters

represents a journey to a better place, a paradise.

Norse warriors would send their dead out to sea

in a flaming funeral boat. According to Maori tradition,

the souls of the deceased would congregate

at the northernmost tip of New Zealand

before setting out on their final journey. And in India,

cremated remains are scattered upon the waters of the Ganges,

so they can be borne out to sea.

In Wales, there was a tradition for the dead to be carried

across the water here, to Bardsey Island.

It was considered so holy,

it became the burial ground for the great and the good

and is known as the Island of 20,000 Saints.

In the 12th century,

Bardsey's sanctity was confirmed by Pope Calixtus

when he decreed that three pilgrimages to Bardsey

were equal to one pilgrimage to Rome.

But for me, seeing Bardsey from a distance

brings me closer to appreciating its real significance as a holy island.

This is the very tip of Wales, the land's end,

a great place to contemplate the infinity of the horizon.

And out there,

a tantalising distance between us and the horizon, is Bardsey.

Perhaps this is the island at the top of the Mappa Mundi,

that stepping stone between this world and the next.

Bardsey seems like a distant paradise that we can see,

but can't quite reach.

But that's how it should be.

I understand now why islands hold an air of mystery and beauty,

and why people have been drawn to them over the centuries.

But I also know that it's not yet my time to take that last step,

to discover what may lie beyond this island's distant shores.

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