Martin Palmer on Britain’s Sacred Land

Everywhere in Britain, our surroundings contain a host of clues that can help unlock the country’s social, religious and cultural past. Aspects of the landscape, urban and rural, hold hidden messages that tell the stories of Britain’s history. Broadcaster and writer Martin Palmer talks to Peter Moore about his new book Sacred Land and how it equips you with the tools and information to decode the history of your own local area.

Can you explain the concept of Sacred Land? And why people should seek it out?

Sacred Land is about discovering the stories, the beliefs and the inspirations, which have literally shaped the landscape we live in – both the natural and the built.

The Sacred Land Project was set up in the UK by ARC and WWF in 1996, and later the ideas spread around the world. It stemmed from the fact that for many years we forgot to respect nature. And we need to remember that again – we need to walk more gently upon the face of the earth. If we don’t, we may push nature to the brink. So the question for environmentalists is: how do we stop ourselves from viewing our natural environment as something simply there to be exploited? An important way to do that is by seeing it as sacred, as special and as part of something far greater and more significant than just whether it is useful to us. Through seeing the world as sacred we learn to respect it and we learn to take care.

How do we find this sense of sacredness in a land so familiar to us: it is outside our front door, or on the way to work, or where we go on holiday? We can do it partly through discovering that literally under our feet, around us, in the names we still use for hills and rivers and in the layouts of our old towns, cities, buildings and landscapes we still have traces of older notions of sacred land. We are surrounded by hints that once we saw the world differently and we can rediscover these more holistic world-views, these kinder more gentle stories if we look.

But we can also start to create new sacred places that reflect a sense of reconnection with nature. Organic farms for example, are for many, harbingers of a new sense of respect and relationship with the land itself.

How did you become interested in Britain’s sacred lands?

I was brought up in a family where my father was an Anglican priest. He worked in some very urban, tough parishes in the south-west, and although sometimes I would escape to beautiful, sacred places like Wells for solace, he also taught me to look wherever you are, however bleak it might seem, and find beauty. My mother taught me to love and respect nature, and to protect it whenever it was threatened. My godmother, who lived in the countryside, taught me to delight in stories and to always ask what story lay behind the bend in a road, the siting of a church, the shape of a burial mound or the layout of a town.

However, it took a visit to Moscow for me to really understand that we walked upon a sacred landscape. In Moscow, Russian orthodox bishops showed me how the city was laid out according to the Book of Revelation and that cities had been deliberately designed to reflect the cosmos, so that the very experience of being in the city would be constantly a sort of pilgrimage. This blew my mind and then I discovered that my own home city of Bristol had exactly the same basis. From then on, everywhere I looked I could see the sacred shapes in the land, the buildings and even in the fields.

What are some of the unexpected things you have decoded from Britain’s towns, villages and countryside?

First of all, I’ve found that most of our rivers and hills have the oldest and most strangely sacred names. For example the river Don, which flows through Doncaster, and all rivers in the UK that start with Do, Da or De are named after the goddess of the rivers called Danu in India and who is honoured in rivers in India and across Europe. In fact many of our rivers have Sanskrit names, which tells us that over 3,000 years ago the people who arrived here and named them had probably originally come from Central Asia and while one branch had travelled west to Europe, another branch had travelled south into India.

The shape of our fields tell us we believed we had to care for nature and the poor, based upon one of the most beautiful books and stories in the Bible, the Book of Ruth, or whether we saw fields as simply economic units, which were purely there to fulfil our needs.

I also discovered that every town and city built before the 19th century was an attempt to create a microcosm of the universe!

In your book you say that there are four different kinds of sacred lands. What are they? How do they differ?

There are four kinds of sacred places, which also capture (I think) the four kinds of sacred experiences that run through time and faith to this day.

The first sacred places are the ones most people expect, and they are everywhere. They are the places that communities have decided will be holy to them, and where they have sited their local church, chapel, synagogue, mosque or temple. Whenever a site is chosen, marked out, blessed and made special, it becomes – through choice and use – a holy place.

It is a place that over time becomes redolent with prayer, with celebration, with mourning and with the cycle of the religious year. It might be a church as old as St Martin’s in Canterbury, built in the fourth century AD, or a new church on a housing estate. It might be a converted terrace house, which is now a mosque, as we have in Bath, or it might be the oldest mosque in Britain, purpose-built in 1889 in Woking, Surrey. We create sacred places for our everyday lives and they become sacred through our intentions.