david hobbs
|
St Pirans near Tintagel
Click to see full size image
This is St Pirans Church near Tintagel in Cornwall. It stands near the Entrance to St Pirans glen, a beautiful steep wooded glen with a swift river running down it's length.
It has the feel of real age to it and is as I would imagine as close to an original ancient place of Christian worship as you will ever find.
Come out of the Church and a short walk latter you are climbing through a wooded glen heading for a place called the Hermitage.
The Hermitage was where St Piran lived his life many many years ago and the tea room built upon the site is still not accessible by road and all goods and services have to be manually carried down a steep incline to this isolated destination.
The tea room is run by a cantankerous old woman and her long suffering son who seems oblivious to her loud and long criticisms screamed from her bedroom window, of his perceived weaknesses whilst trying to deal with the customers at the tea rooms.
Leave the tea rooms and make your way down another steep bank and you come upon a high waterfall set in a huge secluded open topped cavern.
This place is hidden from the world even though signposted at least that is how it felt to me after making the rather slippery decent into it's depths.
Pagans seem to have claimed this place as their own as the many hundreds of offerings upon the nearby rocks give evidence.
Take a closer look and you will find coins and baby's toys together with photographs of baby's fathers lovers and pets all now departed from this world. It is now that you realise that this lovely place is in fact a 21st century pagan place of the dead.
Only then does the significance of the offerings and pictures hit you and you look closer and need more detail.
It leaves you sad looking at how the dreams dreamt by lovers and mothers mothers came to and end but it made me appreciate even more the fact that I could touch the rocks and hear the crashing waterfall and know that I have has 63 very interesting years of life on this planet and makes me realise that everyday is simply an accidental bonus.
Here is a tiny fragment of the offerings the the spirits of the dead
Click to see full size image
|
Raymond
|
Re: St Pirans near Tintagel | david hobbs wrote: | It has the feel of real age to it and is as I would imagine as close to an original ancient place of Christian worship as you will ever find.
Pagans seem to have claimed this place as their own as the many hundreds of offerings upon the nearby rocks give evidence.
|
We know that when the early christians made it to Britain they destroyed many pagan places of worship and built churches there instead.
There wasn't the mass convertion to the new religion as we are often lead to believe. The early pagans clung to thier old ways and continued to congregate in places that had become sacred to them.
Even when the churches were built the pagans still met there because it was the site that was sacred to them not a building.
Saying "pagans have claimed this place as their own" is slightly wrong.
Many modern pagans are "re-claiming" old sites as their own.
Pagans and Witches do indeed sometimes gather in old churchyards because the ground upon which the church was built was once very sacred to our pagan ancestors.
|
david hobbs
|
Yes of course you are right Raymond.
Visiting places like St Pirans leaves you in no doubt that there are many many places that in their natural state do have an air of the mystical about them and you can then fully understand why our ancestors worshipped in places that felt "spiritually connected".
We are a part of this Earth and sometimes we manage by accident or design, to feel it's pulse.
|
Raymond
|
We are indeed part of this earth.
It amazes me when I hear new-age types banging on about "getting back to nature" or "returning to mother earth".
WE are nature. WE are mother earth.
Are we not natural, organic beings ourselves? No matter where you are YOU are nature.
|
|
|
