IN CELTIC CROSS COUNTRY
Many of us have done the annual jaunt down to Cornwall. We’ve joined the throngs driving steadily down the M5; we’ve inwardly gasped at how long it takes to get to Watergate Bay; and we have reassured the kids that yes, we will spend one day at the Eden Project. But do we notice anything else? Like the villages you see signs for, named after saints you have never heard of? Or the occasional Celtic cross you might whizz past on the road? Or the strange formations you can occasionally see in the distance as you finally cross Bodmin Moor? All these should be a sign that there is another side to Cornwall – more mysterious, and more ethereal. The people we have grown to call the Celts attached great religious importance to the region, partly because they felt that seashores and river estuaries were important borders between this world and the afterlife. Such beliefs were not entirely crushed when Christianity took over, because, for a while at least, this area kept its own rather unique religious identity – one where, among other things, women were treated as equal in the eyes of the lord. It was only the version of Christianity promoted by the Roman Empire that put men at the top.
