7HOLY PLACES
Discover seven holy sites where the veil between Heaven and Earth is at its thinnest - starting with the original Mountain of the Angels.
ANGELS, IT TURNS out, can sound an awful lot like sheep.
I’m on the summit of Carn Ingli, high above the Pembrokeshire coast. It’s a bright, crisp evening at the tailend of winter. The sun is breaking through and kissing the grey-white volcanic rhyolites of the summit tor, while all around the moorland is pure burnt umber. Away to the west, the Irish Sea briefly turns azure.
I’ve been sitting still for about half an hour, listening out for angels. I’m not having much luck. Sheep, yes. A tractor down in the Cilgwyn valley, definitely. Herring gulls over the Nyfer estuary. But cherubim and seraphim? Not so much.
But that’s probably because I’m not St Brynach. Carn Ingli, so says legend, is where this Irish-born wandering holy man would ‘commune with the angels’ during his sixthcentury sojourn in the hamlet of Nevern, down at the foot of the hill.
sr@The story of Brynach is woven deep into the fabric of this part of Pembrokeshire. It even underpins the mountain’s name: while the subject of some dispute, the commonest suggested meaning for the original Welsh Carn Engylau is ‘rocky peak of the angels’.
There are countless holy places across Britain of course, from pagan groves to Sikh temples; from chapels barely large enough to stand up in to some of the largest cathedrals in the world. Every belief system has its sacred spaces somewhere in our isles, and you’ll meet some of them later in this list.
But Carn Ingli is our lead, partly because of the richness of its story but also because it’s a holy mountain, which to a walker is perhaps the most tantalising and magnetic form of holy place. Sacred mountains exist all across the world, from Olympus in Greece to Popocatépetl in Mexico; from Sinai in Egypt to Kunlun in China. These are places revered by ancient cultures, usually because of a belief that they somehow connect the human and divine realms. They reach into the sky, touch heaven, and stand where the veil is thinnest.
Such is their importance that the summits of some, like the Himalayan peaks of Kailash and Machapuchare, have never been sullied by human footsteps because of the belief that divinity dwells upon them.
There’s a common belief strand that helps to explain why we connect mountains with holiness in this way (see Axis Mundi, next page). Whether that particular belief was
