Ireland and Britain Holy Sites

1. Why These Islands Are Full of Shrines

Ireland and Britain were evangelised early and monasticised heavily, and the shape of that history is still legible on the ground. Christianity reached Roman Britain by the third century at the latest. Ninian is remembered at Whithorn in Galloway in the fifth century, Patrick worked in Ireland in the same century, Columba crossed from Ireland to Iona in 563, Augustine landed in Kent in 597, and Aidan came from Iona to Lindisfarne in 635. Within two centuries the two islands were covered in monasteries, and the monastery, rather than the cathedral city, was the normal centre of Irish church life.

Those monasteries are the reason so many of the sites on this page are ruins beside water. Irish and Scottish monks looked for islands, lake shores and river crossings: Glendalough between two lakes in the Wicklow mountains, Clonmacnoise where the Shannon meets an ancient east-west road, Skellig Michael on a rock in the Atlantic, Iona in the Hebrides, Lindisfarne cut off twice a day by the tide. Vikings burned many of them from the late eighth century onward, Norman reform reorganised what survived, and the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the parallel suppressions in Ireland and Scotland ended the rest as living communities.

The Reformation Break, and What Survived It

England, Wales and Scotland broke with Rome in the sixteenth century, and the shrines were a specific target. Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury was destroyed in 1538 and his name was ordered struck from the service books. Cuthbert's shrine at Durham was stripped in the same period and his body reburied under a plain slab. The image of Our Lady of Walsingham was carried to London and burned. Glastonbury's last abbot was hanged, drawn and quartered on the Tor above his own abbey in 1539. Ireland kept the Catholic faith of most of its people through penal legislation, and the pilgrimages there went on in the open air, at mountains, wells and lake islands that no government could pull down. That is one reason the Irish sites in this guide are climbs and fasts while the English ones are buildings.

Almost every site here was revived, and the revivals are recent. Walsingham restarted in the 1890s and the 1920s. The Iona abbey buildings were rebuilt from 1938 onward. The shrine of St David was refurnished and its relics returned to public veneration in 2012. Understanding which layer you are standing on, the ancient foundation, the ruin, or the modern restoration, keeps a visit honest.

What Counts as a Pilgrimage Here

Catholic teaching treats pilgrimage as an expression of popular piety that supports the sacramental life without replacing it, and the Catechism lists pilgrimages among the forms of devotion that evoke the earthly journey toward heaven (CCC 2691, and on popular piety generally CCC 1674). Nothing on this page is required of any Catholic. Our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is sets out the distinction between a devotional journey and a holiday with a church in it, and our overview of the major Christian pilgrimage sites places these islands in the wider map that includes Rome, the Holy Land and Compostela.

2. Knock, County Mayo

Knock is a village in County Mayo where, on the wet evening of 21 August 1879, villagers reported seeing a silent tableau at the south gable of the parish church: the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist holding a book, and an altar bearing a lamb and a cross, surrounded by light. The witnesses stood in the rain for around two hours. Nothing was said. The absence of any message is the feature that distinguishes Knock from every other well-known apparition site, and it shaped what the shrine became.

The Archbishop of Tuam appointed a commission of inquiry within weeks, and it took depositions from the witnesses; a second commission examined the surviving witnesses in 1936. Both found the testimony trustworthy. Knock has no decree in the style of Lourdes or Pontmain declaring the apparition supernatural, and its standing rests on those inquiries, on long practice and above all on the acts of the popes. John Paul II came for the centenary in 1979 and gave the shrine a Golden Rose. Pope Francis visited in August 2018. In 2021 Pope Francis designated Knock an International Marian and Eucharistic Shrine, which ties it directly to the Holy See. The Eucharistic element in that title comes from the altar with the lamb in the reported vision.

Source: the accounts of the 1879 and 1936 commissions of inquiry as published by Knock Shrine and the Archdiocese of Tuam, and the announcements of the shrine's international status in 2021.

What a visitor finds at Knock is a large modern sanctuary built around a small nineteenth-century church. The Apparition Chapel encloses the original gable wall. The basilica, dedicated in 1976, holds a very large congregation. There is a chapel of reconciliation with confessions heard through much of the day, an anointing and blessing of the sick, and an evening Rosary procession. The National Novena each August is the shrine's busiest week. Knock is the one place in Ireland where a family can do everything a Marian shrine offers on flat ground, which is why so many pilgrims pair it with Croagh Patrick or Ballintubber a short drive away.

How Knock Sits in the Church's Judgments

Since the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published its Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena on 17 May 2024, the Church ordinarily does not declare any apparition supernatural, and the usual favourable outcome is a permission called a nihil obstat. Knock was judged long before that framework existed, under a different procedure, and nothing in the 2024 norms changes its standing. Our guide to how the Church actually judges Marian apparitions sets out the six possible conclusions in the current norms and gives the documented acts behind Knock and the other cases side by side.

3. Croagh Patrick, the Reek

Croagh Patrick is a quartzite cone above Clew Bay in County Mayo, climbed as a penitential pilgrimage because Saint Patrick is said to have kept a forty-day fast on its summit. Irish people call it the Reek. The traditional day for the climb is Reek Sunday, the last Sunday of July, when pilgrims walk up in the dark and at first light and Mass is said in the small oratory built on the summit in 1905. Pilgrims climb on other days through the summer as well, and a smaller number still climb barefoot.

The mountain was a place of assembly at the turning of summer long before Christianity reached Ireland, and the Christian pilgrimage absorbed that older calendar rather than erasing it. Archaeological work on the summit has identified an early medieval oratory and enclosure, so the practice of praying on the top is very old. The climb itself is steep and the last stretch, a loose scree slope the pilgrims call the cone, turns ankles every year. Mountain rescue teams are on the mountain on Reek Sunday for that reason.

Source: the summit excavations directed for the Office of Public Works in the 1990s, and the annual arrangements published by the Archdiocese of Tuam and Croagh Patrick's own pilgrimage information.

The Traditional Stations

The old pilgrimage has a fixed pattern of prayer at three points, and pilgrims who want the traditional form still keep it. At Leacht Benain, the first cairn on the ridge, the pilgrim walks around the mound praying a set round of Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Creeds. On the summit the pilgrim prays at the chapel, goes to confession or Mass where they are available, and walks around the summit enclosure. At Roilig Mhuire, the three cairns on the western shoulder, the pattern is repeated. The whole exercise is bodily, repetitive and unspectacular, which is the point of it.

The life of Patrick himself sits beside this page rather than on it. Our profile of Saint Patrick, the Roman Briton who returned to the country that enslaved him covers the man, the shamrock and the snakes; this guide stays with the places that carry his name.

4. Lough Derg and St Patrick's Purgatory

Lough Derg in County Donegal holds Station Island, the site of Saint Patrick's Purgatory, where pilgrims have made a three-day fast and vigil for many centuries. The exercise is severe by any modern standard: barefoot for the whole stay, one plain meal a day of dry bread and black tea, an entire night kept awake in the basilica, and a fixed round of prayers walked at the penitential beds, the stone circles that are the footings of early monastic cells. The fast continues until midnight of the day the pilgrim leaves the island.

The medieval fame of the place came from a cave. A twelfth-century Latin text, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii written by a Cistercian usually named as H. of Saltrey, told the story of a knight called Owein who entered the cave on the island and passed through visions of purgatory and paradise. Copies of that text travelled across Europe and made Lough Derg one of the best known pilgrimages in Christendom, mentioned in continental literature for centuries. The cave itself was closed and destroyed by order in 1632 during a period of official suppression, and the pilgrimage continued anyway, on the island, in the open, through the penal years.

Source: the medieval Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii and the pilgrimage history published by the Lough Derg sanctuary in the Diocese of Clogher.

What the Pilgrimage Actually Asks

The three-day pilgrimage runs during a season in the summer months, and shorter one-day retreats are offered at other points in the year. The sanctuary itself is the authority on what is available and on how to book, so ask there rather than relying on any page, including this one. What does not change is the shape of the exercise. Pilgrims begin the fast at midnight before they travel, cross by boat, remove their shoes on arrival, and walk the stations. The vigil night is the centre of it. Sleep is refused for roughly twenty-four hours, and the prayers are said aloud in a building full of people doing the same thing.

Confession is available throughout, and the sacrament is the reason many people go. Lough Derg is penitential in a way that Knock is not, and Irish Catholics have used it for centuries the way an earlier Christendom used long fasts: for a sin they cannot shake, a bereavement, an addiction, a marriage in trouble, a decision. The Church attaches no guarantee to it. Doing the three days does not settle anything about a soul's standing, and the sanctuary does not claim that it does. What it offers is confession, the Eucharist, silence and an interruption of ordinary comfort long enough to hear something.

5. Glendalough and St Kevin

Glendalough is a glaciated valley in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin holding the remains of the monastery founded by Saint Kevin in the sixth century. The name means the valley of the two lakes. Kevin, who died in the early seventh century, is remembered as a hermit who settled at the Upper Lake and attracted a community he had not gone there to gather. The monastery he left behind became one of the great schools of early Ireland and survived Viking raids, Norman reorganisation and eventual absorption into the Diocese of Dublin in 1214.

What stands today is a monastic city in miniature: a round tower of the classic Irish type, the cathedral, the small stone-roofed oratory called St Kevin's Kitchen, the gateway with its two arches, and the Church of the Blessed Virgin. Along the Upper Lake are Reefert Church, Teampall na Skellig on the far shore, and the cavity in the cliff face known as St Kevin's Bed. Pilgrims still walk St Kevin's Way, the old road from Hollywood in west Wicklow over the mountains into the valley, which has been waymarked and revived as a pilgrim path.

Praying in a Ruin

Glendalough gets a large number of walkers and a smaller number of pilgrims, and the difference is a decision the visitor makes. A ruined monastery is a strange place to pray, because the community that prayed there is gone and the building is roofless. Two things help. The first is to say the psalms, since the monks who built these walls spent their lives in them and the words have not changed. The second is to go early or late, when the car parks are empty and the valley sounds the way it sounded in the seventh century. There is a Catholic parish church nearby for Mass, and the annual pilgrimage on the feast of St Kevin on 3 June brings the valley back to its original use for a day.

Glendalough belongs with the other great Irish monastic sites in one respect: the monks who filled it are the same movement that produced Columba on Iona, Ciaran at Clonmacnoise and the anchorites of Skellig Michael. Ireland's monastic Christianity exported itself, and Iona and Lindisfarne further down this page are its two most consequential exports.

6. Clonmacnoise on the Shannon

Clonmacnoise stands on the east bank of the Shannon in County Offaly, at the crossing point of Ireland's main river and the ancient east-west ridge road, and Saint Ciaran founded it there in the middle of the sixth century. The site's position explains its importance: whoever held Clonmacnoise sat on the junction of the two great routes of the midlands. Ciaran himself died young, within a year of founding it according to the traditional accounts, and the monastery he began became a centre of learning, manuscript production and stone carving for the next thousand years.

The remains are exceptional. There are two round towers, one of them attached to a church, the ruins of a cathedral where high kings of Ireland were buried, and a set of high crosses of which the Cross of the Scriptures is the most famous, carved with panels of biblical scenes and an inscription naming a king and an abbot. The originals of the major crosses are now sheltered in the visitor centre with replicas standing in their old places, which is what preservation in Irish weather requires. Down the field stands the Nuns' Church with a fine Romanesque doorway.

Clonmacnoise was raided many times by Irish kings, by Vikings and by Anglo-Normans, and it was finally wrecked in 1552 by an English garrison from Athlone, after which the site fell out of monastic use. It kept its function as a burial ground and a place of prayer regardless. John Paul II came to Clonmacnoise in 1979 during the same visit that took him to Knock, and the raised platform built for that Mass is still there.

The Feast and the Pattern

The feast of Saint Ciaran falls on 9 September, and the traditional local pilgrimage, called a pattern in Ireland, is kept on and around that day with Mass at the site and prayers at Ciaran's small church, Temple Ciaran. Patterns of this kind survived at holy wells and monastic sites all over Ireland through the penal period, often with no priest present, and they are the reason the Irish sites in this guide never entirely stopped being used.

7. Downpatrick, Saul and Armagh

Downpatrick in County Down is where tradition places the grave of Saint Patrick, and a heavy slab of Mourne granite cut with the name PATRIC lies in the churchyard of Down Cathedral on the hill above the town. The slab is modern. It was placed in 1900 by the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club to stop souvenir hunters digging up the ground, and it marks a tradition rather than an excavated grave. The medieval tradition held that Patrick, Brigid and Columba were all buried on that hill, a claim first recorded centuries after their deaths.

Source: the Down Cathedral guidebooks and the record of the 1900 placement of the granite slab by the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club. The identification of the burial rests on medieval tradition and has never been archaeologically confirmed.

Down Cathedral belongs to the Church of Ireland, which is the Anglican body in Ireland, and the Catholic parish church of St Patrick stands elsewhere in the town. Both traditions honour Patrick, and Catholic pilgrimages come to the hill every year. Two miles away at Saul is the site where Patrick is said to have been given a barn for his first church by a local chieftain named Dichu, and a small memorial church built in 1932 stands there now. Struell Wells, a set of stone bathing houses and a ruined church in a hollow outside the town, was a resort of pilgrims for centuries and its buildings are still standing.

Armagh and Its Two Cathedrals

Armagh is the primatial see of Ireland and carries the odd distinction of having two cathedrals of Saint Patrick facing each other across the town, one Church of Ireland and one Catholic. Patrick is credited with founding his principal church on the hill of Ard Macha, and the medieval cathedral on that hill passed to the reformed Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century. Catholics built their own cathedral of St Patrick on the opposite hill in the nineteenth century, a twin-spired building begun in 1840 and finished in 1904 after the Famine interrupted it. Both archbishops use the title Primate of All Ireland.

The arrangement is a fair picture of the religious history of these islands, and Armagh has become one of the places where the two bodies actually meet. Joint services and joint civic occasions happen there regularly. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what unity does and does not mean sets out the Catholic position on those meetings, and our guide to Anglicanism as Anglicans describe it explains what the Church of Ireland holds.

8. Kildare and St Brigid

Kildare is the town in Leinster that grew around the monastery of Saint Brigid, the woman who stands with Patrick and Columba as one of the three patrons of Ireland. The Irish name, Cill Dara, means the church of the oak. Brigid founded a double monastery of women and men there around the end of the fifth century, and the community she led was unusual in the scale of authority a woman held in it. Her earliest surviving life was written by a monk named Cogitosus in the seventh century and describes a large and busy church at Kildare with the tombs of Brigid and Bishop Conleth on either side of the altar.

What a visitor finds today is a Church of Ireland cathedral of St Brigid on the site, with a fine round tower beside it that can be climbed, and a reconstructed fire pit in the grounds. The fire is the strongest of the Kildare traditions: Gerald of Wales, writing in the twelfth century, described a perpetual flame tended at Kildare by the nuns and enclosed by a hedge. The Brigidine Sisters relit a flame in Kildare in 1993, and their centre, Solas Bhride, keeps it. A relic long venerated at Lumiar in Portugal and honoured there as a relic of Brigid was brought to Kildare in 2024, the fifteen-hundredth anniversary year of her traditional death date.

Source: Cogitosus, Vita Sanctae Brigidae (seventh century); Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica (twelfth century), for the perpetual fire; and the announcements of the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin and the Brigidine Sisters for the 1993 flame and the 2024 relic.

Brigid's Day and What It Means Now

Brigid's feast falls on 1 February, and since 2023 the Irish state has kept a public holiday attached to it, the first Irish public holiday named for a woman. The feast sits on the older Irish quarter day of Imbolc, and a good deal of writing conflates Brigid the abbess with a pre-Christian goddess of the same name. The honest position is that the sources for the historical Brigid are hagiographical and late, that a woman who founded and led Kildare is well attested in the earliest church records of Ireland, and that the folk customs around her feast, the rush cross and the Brat Bhride, are Christian practices that absorbed older seasonal material.

Kildare is a quieter pilgrimage than Knock or Croagh Patrick. People come for the well at Tully on the edge of the town, for the round tower, and increasingly for the February feast, when the town fills. It suits a pilgrim who wants to pray about work, hospitality and ordinary responsibility rather than about crisis.

9. Ballintubber and the Tochar Phadraig

Ballintubber Abbey in County Mayo is an Augustinian church founded in 1216 by Cathal Crobhdearg Ua Conchobair, King of Connacht, and the community that runs it describes it as the abbey where Mass has been celebrated continuously since its foundation, through suppression, burning and the penal laws. The abbey was suppressed in the sixteenth century and its roof was burned by Cromwellian soldiers in 1653. Local people kept using the roofless nave. A full restoration was completed in 1966, and the building is a working parish church today.

Source: the claim of unbroken celebration of Mass since 1216 is the abbey's own, published by Ballintubber Abbey; the dates of suppression, burning and the 1966 restoration are from the same source and from the National Monuments record.

The abbey stands at the start of the Tochar Phadraig, the old pilgrim road that runs roughly thirty-five kilometres west from Ballintubber to the foot of Croagh Patrick and up the mountain. The route follows a pre-Christian roadway that carried chariots to the Reek, and stretches of the original stone surface survive. Ballintubber restored and waymarked the path in the 1980s, and the abbey organises guided walks along it. Walking the Tochar and then climbing the Reek in one day is a long day on foot, and it is the fullest form the Mayo pilgrimage takes.

Why the Old Road Matters

A pilgrim road changes the character of a pilgrimage. Arriving at a shrine by car makes the shrine the whole event; walking to it makes the journey part of the prayer, which is the logic of the Camino de Santiago routes in Spain and of the medieval roads to Canterbury and Walsingham in England. The Tochar Phadraig is Ireland's clearest surviving example, and it is walked in far smaller numbers than the Camino, which some pilgrims count as an advantage.

10. Skellig Michael

Skellig Michael is a pyramid of rock in the Atlantic off the coast of County Kerry, carrying the remains of an early Irish monastery on a shelf near its summit: six corbelled beehive cells, two oratories, a later medieval church, terraces, cisterns and a burial ground, reached by long flights of stone steps cut into the cliff. Monks lived there from perhaps the sixth or seventh century until the twelfth or thirteenth, when the community moved to the mainland at Ballinskelligs. The island was dedicated to the Archangel Michael, as high and dangerous places across Europe were, in the same family as Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy and Monte Sant'Angelo in Apulia.

Skellig Michael was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996. Access is tightly controlled by the Irish state heritage authorities, landings depend entirely on the Atlantic swell, and the climb is exposed with no handrails. People have died on those steps. The practical position is that a visit is never guaranteed and the official heritage service is the only authority on whether landings are permitted at any given time.

Source: UNESCO World Heritage List inscription of Sceilg Mhichil (1996), and the site management information published by the Office of Public Works.

What the Monks Were Doing There

The Irish tradition of seeking a place of extreme isolation for the sake of God had a name, peregrinatio pro Christo, pilgrimage for Christ's sake, and it meant leaving home permanently rather than travelling and returning. Columba's departure for Iona was that kind of exile. The Skellig community carried the practice to its physical limit: no soil worth speaking of, water only from cisterns cut in rock, supplies by boat when the sea allowed. Standing on the terrace and reading Psalm 130 out of the wind is a fair use of the place, and it explains a form of Christian life that a modern visitor otherwise finds simply strange.

11. Walsingham and Its Two Shrines

Walsingham is a village in north Norfolk that was England's principal Marian shrine in the Middle Ages and is now the site of two separate shrines, one Catholic and one Anglican, each with its own foundation, clergy and buildings. The medieval story, as told in the Pynson Ballad printed around 1496, is that a widow named Richeldis de Faverches was shown the house of the Annunciation at Nazareth in a vision and built a replica of it at Walsingham, traditionally dated 1061. An Augustinian priory grew up around the Holy House. Kings walked the last mile barefoot from the Slipper Chapel, and Walsingham ranked with Canterbury as an English destination.

The priory was suppressed in 1538. The image of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken to London and burned at Chelsea, and the Holy House was pulled down. What survived above ground was the priory's east arch, standing in a private garden, and the fourteenth-century Slipper Chapel a mile away at Houghton St Giles, which was used as a barn for three centuries.

The Catholic Shrine

The Catholic revival began with the Slipper Chapel. Charlotte Boyd, a convert, bought the building in the 1890s and had it restored for Catholic use. A pilgrimage from the Catholic church of the Annunciation in King's Lynn came to it in 1897, with Leo XIII's approval for the restoration of the shrine. In 1934 the bishops designated the Slipper Chapel the National Shrine of Our Lady for English Catholics, and a large open-air pilgrimage marked the occasion. The Catholic shrine today has the medieval Slipper Chapel, a modern Chapel of Reconciliation built in the 1980s, and the Holy Mile from the Slipper Chapel into the village, which many pilgrims walk barefoot.

The Anglican Shrine

The Anglican shrine is a separate foundation with a separate history, and Anglicans would want it described in their own terms. Alfred Hope Patten became vicar of Walsingham in 1921 and was an Anglo-Catholic, part of the movement within the Church of England that recovered Catholic devotion and ceremonial. He commissioned an image of Our Lady of Walsingham modelled on the seal of the medieval priory and set it up in the parish church in 1922. In 1931 he built a new Holy House on a site in the village, enclosed in a shrine church that was extended in 1938, with a well and a pilgrimage programme of its own. The Anglican shrine is governed by its own college of guardians and is one of the principal centres of Anglo-Catholic life in England.

Both bodies keep the same title, Our Lady of Walsingham, and their pilgrims pass each other in the village street. The Catholic and Anglican shrines cooperate on some occasions and remain distinct institutions, and a Catholic pilgrim visiting the Anglican Holy House is a visitor there. Our guide to Anglo-Catholicism and what it holds explains the movement Hope Patten belonged to, and our guide to the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham covers the structure Benedict XVI erected in 2011 for Anglicans entering full communion with Rome, which took its title from this village. There is also an Orthodox chapel in the old railway station and a Methodist chapel in the village, which makes Walsingham an unusually crowded piece of English religious geography.

12. Canterbury and Thomas Becket

Canterbury became England's greatest pilgrimage city because an archbishop was murdered in his own cathedral there on 29 December 1170. Thomas Becket had quarrelled with King Henry II over the liberties of the Church and the jurisdiction of the royal courts over clergy, had spent years in exile in France, and had returned to Canterbury weeks before four knights of the king's household cut him down in the north-west transept during Vespers. Alexander III canonised him in 1173, less than three years later. Henry did public penance at the tomb in 1174.

Becket's body was moved from the crypt to a golden shrine behind the high altar on 7 July 1220, a date kept afterwards as the feast of the Translation, and pilgrims came in enormous numbers for the next three centuries. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in the 1380s and 1390s, is set on that road. Henry VIII destroyed the shrine in 1538, ordered Becket's name erased from the service books, and carried off its treasure. The spot behind the altar where the shrine stood is now marked by a single lit candle on bare stone, which is a more affecting sight than the shrine would have been.

Visiting Canterbury as a Catholic

Canterbury Cathedral belongs to the Church of England and is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who holds a primacy of honour among the bishops of the Anglican Communion. Catholic pilgrims go there constantly and are welcome. The two places to pray are the Martyrdom, the transept where Becket was killed, marked by a jagged sculpture of swords, and the empty site of the shrine in the Trinity Chapel. The Catholic parish church of St Thomas of Canterbury is a short walk away in the city and holds a relic of Becket, and Mass is the reason a Catholic pilgrim goes there. Popes and archbishops of Canterbury have prayed together in the cathedral several times since Paul VI met Michael Ramsey in 1966, and Becket, who was killed defending the Church's independence from the crown, has a complicated afterlife as a shared saint. Our guide to the Church of England and how it understands itself gives the background, and our guide to the Reformation and what it changed covers the destruction of the shrines.

Two other English sites belong beside Canterbury for a Catholic pilgrim, and both are named here without a page of their own. Tyburn in London, where many Catholics were executed under the penal laws, is marked by a convent of Benedictine nuns near Marble Arch. The English and Welsh martyrs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them Thomas More and John Fisher, are honoured at the Tower of London and at sites across the country. Our profile of Thomas More, his conscience and his execution covers the best known of them.

13. Iona and St Columba

Iona is a small island off the western tip of Mull in the Inner Hebrides where Saint Columba, an Irish monk and nobleman of the Ui Neill, landed with twelve companions in 563 and founded the monastery from which much of Scotland and northern England was evangelised. Columba died on the island in 597. Adomnan, an abbot of Iona writing about a century later, produced the Life of Columba that remains the principal source for him, and the island's scriptorium is a plausible birthplace for at least part of the Book of Kells, which was later carried to Ireland for safety.

Viking raids battered Iona repeatedly from 795 onward, and the Annals of Ulster record a killing of monks at the island in 806. The community's treasures and much of its personnel moved to Kells in Ireland and to Dunkeld in Scotland. A Benedictine abbey and an Augustinian nunnery were established on the island around 1200, and both were suppressed at the Scottish Reformation. The burial ground called Reilig Odhrain, beside the small twelfth-century chapel of St Oran, is traditionally the burial place of early kings of Scots, Ireland and Norway, a claim recorded in later sources rather than demonstrated by excavation.

Source: Adomnan of Iona, Vita Columbae (late seventh century); the Annals of Ulster for the raids of 795 and 806; and Historic Environment Scotland for the medieval abbey and nunnery. The tradition of royal burials at Reilig Odhrain rests on late medieval accounts.

The Abbey Today and the Iona Community

The abbey church was restored from 1899 after the Duke of Argyll transferred the buildings to a trust, and the monastic living quarters were rebuilt from 1938 onward by the Iona Community, founded by George MacLeod, a Church of Scotland minister who brought unemployed Glasgow craftsmen and trainee ministers to rebuild the ruins together. The Iona Community describes itself as an ecumenical Christian community committed to peace, justice and the integration of worship and work, dispersed across Britain with a base on the island. It is a Reformed foundation in origin and includes members of many churches.

A Catholic pilgrim on Iona prays in a building held by a trust and used by that community, attends its services as a guest, and goes to Mass elsewhere, since a Catholic does not receive Communion at a Reformed or Anglican celebration. Catholic pilgrimages to Iona happen every year, and the standing stone crosses outside the west door, St Martin's Cross among them, have been in place since the eighth century and were carved for exactly what a pilgrim does at them.

14. Lindisfarne, the Holy Island

Lindisfarne is a tidal island off the Northumberland coast, joined to the mainland by a causeway that floods twice a day, where the Irish monk Aidan founded a monastery in 635 at the invitation of King Oswald of Northumbria. Oswald had been in exile on Iona and wanted a bishop from there, so Lindisfarne is a direct daughter of Columba's foundation. From it Northumbria and much of northern England were converted. The Lindisfarne Gospels, an illuminated manuscript made around the year 700 and traditionally ascribed to Bishop Eadfrith, came from this community and is now in the British Library.

Saint Cuthbert is the island's dominant figure. He was a monk and prior at Melrose and Lindisfarne, spent years as a hermit on the tiny Inner Farne, was made bishop against his wishes and died in 687. When his coffin was opened years later his body was found undecayed, and a great cult grew around him across northern England. On 8 June 793 Viking raiders sacked Lindisfarne, an event recorded with horror in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and often used to date the start of the Viking Age in Britain. In 875 the community left the island altogether, carrying Cuthbert's coffin with them, and wandered for over a century before settling at Durham.

What stands on the island now is the ruin of the Norman priory rebuilt by monks from Durham in the twelfth century, the parish church of St Mary beside it, and a sixteenth-century castle on a crag. Pilgrims cross by the road causeway or barefoot across the sands on the line of poles called the Pilgrims' Way. The tides are the one thing that governs a visit, cars are wrecked and people cut off every year, and the official safe crossing times published for the causeway are the only authority worth using.

The Synod of Whitby and the Two Easters

Lindisfarne stood on one side of the argument that the Synod of Whitby settled in 664. The Irish and Ionan tradition calculated the date of Easter and cut the monastic tonsure differently from the Roman practice brought to Kent by Augustine's mission, and in Northumbria the king and queen were keeping Easter on different days. King Oswiu decided for the Roman reckoning. Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne, who had argued for the tradition of Columba, resigned and went back to Iona and then to Ireland with those who agreed with him. The decision brought the northern English church into step with the rest of the Latin West, and it is why the Celtic Christianity sometimes imagined as a separate church is better described as a set of regional customs inside the one Church.

15. Durham, Cuthbert and Bede

Durham Cathedral holds the grave of Saint Cuthbert and the bones of the Venerable Bede, and it exists because the monks who carried Cuthbert's coffin off Lindisfarne in 875 finally settled on the rock in the loop of the River Wear in 995. The Norman cathedral was begun in 1093, and UNESCO describes it as the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England, its ribbed vault an early experiment that helped set the model for later Gothic vaulting. Cuthbert's shrine stood behind the high altar and was one of the wealthiest in the country until it was stripped in the 1530s. His body was reburied under a plain slab on the same spot, cut with the single word CVTHBERTVS, and it is still there.

Source: UNESCO World Heritage List, Durham Castle and Cathedral (inscribed 1986), for the description of the cathedral and its vaulting.

Bede is at the other end of the building, in the Galilee Chapel at the west door. He died at Jarrow in 735, having written the Ecclesiastical History of the English People that supplies most of what is known about Aidan, Cuthbert, Whitby and the conversion of the English. His remains were removed to Durham in the eleventh century. A pilgrim who reads the sources for the sites in this guide is reading Bede for many of them, and standing at his tomb is a reasonable act of gratitude.

Durham Cathedral is a Church of England cathedral and, with the castle, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986. The sanctuary knocker on the north door, a replica now with the original in the museum, marks the medieval right of sanctuary: a fugitive who reached it could claim the protection of the church for a fixed period. Cuthbert's coffin, his pectoral cross and other objects recovered from the tomb are displayed in the cathedral's museum, which makes Durham the one place on this page where a visitor can see the actual seventh-century objects that were carried through the Viking raids.

16. St Davids in Wales

St Davids in Pembrokeshire is Britain's smallest city by population, according to the census figures published by the Office for National Statistics, and the burial place of Saint David, the patron of Wales, who founded a monastery in the valley there in the sixth century and died late in it. The cathedral sits below the level of the surrounding land, out of sight of the sea, because Viking raids came up that coast repeatedly. David is remembered for an ascetic rule, for water rather than beer, and for the words the Welsh tradition assigns to his last sermon: be joyful, keep the faith, and do the little things you have seen me do.

The medieval pilgrimage to St Davids was one of the largest in Britain, and a long-standing tradition holds that Pope Callixtus II ruled two pilgrimages to St Davids equal to one to Rome. That tradition is recorded in later sources and has no surviving papal document behind it, so it is best treated as a medieval claim about the shrine's standing rather than as an established act. What is documented is that the cult was papally recognised in the twelfth century and that kings of England came as pilgrims.

Source: the equivalence of two pilgrimages to St Davids with one to Rome is a medieval tradition reported in later accounts of the shrine; no contemporary papal document establishing it survives.

The shrine of St David behind the high altar was restored and refurnished in 2012, with painted icons of David, Patrick and Andrew, and a casket in the Holy Trinity Chapel holds bones long venerated as those of David and his companion Justinian. Scientific testing reported that those bones are later than the sixth century, which the cathedral states openly. The Church permits the veneration of relics, and the question of what a particular set of bones physically is stays separate from the honour paid to the saint, the same distinction that governs the Shroud of Turin.

St Non's and the Welsh Sites

A short walk from the cathedral, on the cliff above the bay, are the ruins of St Non's Chapel and a holy well, marking the traditional birthplace of David, with a small twentieth-century Catholic chapel and a retreat house beside them. The cathedral belongs to the Church in Wales, the Anglican body disestablished in 1920, and the Catholic parish in the city serves pilgrims for Mass. David's feast on 1 March is kept across Wales.

17. Whithorn and St Ninian

Whithorn in Galloway, in the south-west of Scotland, is the site of the Candida Casa, the white house, which Bede describes as a stone church built by a British bishop named Ninian who had been instructed at Rome. Bede's account, written in the eighth century, places Ninian well before Columba and makes Whithorn the earliest recorded Christian centre in what is now Scotland. Excavations at Whithorn have found an early Christian settlement with imported Mediterranean pottery, and the Latinus Stone, a memorial inscription usually dated to around the middle of the fifth century, is the oldest Christian monument in Scotland.

Source: Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica III.4, for Ninian and the Candida Casa; the Whithorn excavations, and the dating of the Latinus Stone and its description as the earliest Christian memorial in Scotland as published by Historic Environment Scotland and the excavation reports.

A medieval priory grew on the site, and Whithorn became the national pilgrimage of Scotland. James IV walked there repeatedly. The Scottish Parliament banned pilgrimage to Whithorn in 1581 after the Reformation, which is a fair measure of how important it had been. The priory ruins, the museum with its collection of early Christian carved stones, and the crypt where the shrine stood are open to visitors. Three miles away on the coast is St Ninian's Cave, a hollow in the cliff traditionally used by Ninian for solitary prayer, where crosses carved on the rock and left on the shingle accumulate to this day.

Whithorn's modern pilgrimage is small and ecumenical. Catholic, Church of Scotland and Episcopal pilgrimages come each year, usually around Ninian's feast on 16 September. The site suits a pilgrim who wants the earliest layer of Christianity in these islands without crowds, and it pairs naturally with Iona for anyone tracing how Scotland was converted from two directions.

18. Holywell and St Winefride's Well

Holywell in Flintshire, north Wales, is the site of St Winefride's Well, a spring enclosed in a late medieval stone chapel where pilgrims have come for centuries and where people still bathe in the water. The legend attached to it is seventh-century and violent: Winefride, a young woman of a noble family, refused a chieftain named Caradog, who struck off her head; a spring rose where her head fell, and her uncle Saint Beuno restored her to life, after which she lived as a nun and later abbess at Gwytherin. The story survives in medieval lives written centuries after the events and is a legend of the usual hagiographical type. The well itself and the continuity of prayer at it are documented facts of a different order.

The shrine claims an unbroken record of public pilgrimage since the seventh century, which would make it unique in Britain, and it kept going through the Reformation and the penal laws when every comparable English shrine was destroyed. The star-vaulted well chapel was built around 1500 under the patronage of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. Henry V is recorded as walking there in 1416, Richard III endowed it, and James II and Mary of Modena came in 1686 to pray for an heir. Jesuits maintained a mission at Holywell through the penal period at considerable risk, and the shrine is served by the Catholic parish today.

Source: the claim of unbroken pilgrimage since the seventh century is made by the shrine of St Winefride at Holywell; the royal visits and the building of the well chapel under Lady Margaret Beaufort are documented in the shrine's published history and in the National Monuments record for Wales.

Bathing and What the Church Claims

Pilgrims pass through the water in the outer bath, traditionally three times, praying as they go, and take water away. The Church makes no claim that the water has power in itself, exactly as it makes no such claim at Lourdes. Cures reported at Holywell over the centuries are recorded on crutches and plaques at the site, and the Church has never conducted at Holywell the sort of formal medical process that operates in the Pyrenees. Our guide to how the Catholic Church verifies a miracle explains the standard that is applied when a claim is examined, and our guide to the Lourdes pilgrimage describes the medical bureau in detail.

Holywell is often called the Lourdes of Wales, and the comparison is fair on function and misleading on scale. Winefride's feast is 3 November, and the annual pilgrimage in June draws people from across Britain. Anyone who cannot travel to a Continental shrine has, in this well, the nearest equivalent in these islands.

19. Glastonbury and the Legends

Glastonbury in Somerset holds the ruins of one of the greatest Benedictine abbeys in England, and it also carries a body of medieval legend that has to be separated from its history before the place makes any sense. The documented Glastonbury is a Saxon monastery of the seventh century, reformed and enlarged by Saint Dunstan as abbot around 940, immensely wealthy by the eleventh century, rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1184, and dissolved in 1539, when the last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered on Glastonbury Tor above his own house.

The legends are these, and they are legends. That Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain after the Resurrection, founded the first church at Glastonbury and planted his staff on Wearyall Hill, where it grew into the Holy Thorn. That the Holy Grail was brought to or hidden at Glastonbury. That Glastonbury is the Avalon of the Arthurian romances and that King Arthur and Guinevere were buried there. Each of these appears in writing from the twelfth century onward, more than a thousand years after the events described, and none has any historical evidence behind it. The monks announced the discovery of Arthur's grave in 1191, seven years after the fire that had destroyed their church and left them needing money for the rebuilding, and modern historians read that announcement in the light of the timing.

Source: the Joseph of Arimathea, Grail and Avalon material is attested from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward in works including William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae as later interpolated, Gerald of Wales on the 1191 exhumation, and the Old French romances. The Catholic Church has never taught any of it.

Why Catholics Still Go

The Catholic and Anglican pilgrimages to Glastonbury both take place each year and owe nothing to the legends. The Catholic pilgrimage centres on the abbey ruins and on the shrine of Our Lady of Glastonbury in the Catholic parish church of St Mary, which holds a statue carved to replace the medieval image of Our Lady of Glastonbury destroyed at the dissolution. What a pilgrim honours there is a thousand years of Benedictine prayer and a martyred abbot, and the Tor where Whiting died is the natural place to pray for the English martyrs. Modern Glastonbury also carries a large amount of neo-pagan and New Age activity in its shops and festivals, which surprises visitors who arrive expecting a quiet abbey town. That material has nothing to do with the Christian site, and it makes the abbey grounds, which are walled and quiet, more valuable rather than less.

20. Choosing Which Site to Visit

Choosing a site in these islands is a question of what you are going for, and the sites differ sharply on that. A penitential pilgrimage, a Marian pilgrimage, a monastic retreat and a martyrs' pilgrimage are four different journeys, and packing them into one trip usually produces a coach tour instead of a pilgrimage. The table below sets the main sites against what each is actually for.

Four Sensible Itineraries

• Mayo in three days. Knock, Ballintubber, the Tochar Phadraig and Croagh Patrick sit within a short radius, and together they give a Marian shrine, a working abbey, a pilgrim road and a mountain.
• The Irish monastic line. Glendalough, Clonmacnoise and, if the sea allows, Skellig Michael, with Kildare on the way. This is a journey about the sixth and seventh centuries.
• Northumbria and the north. Lindisfarne, Durham and Whitby, extended north to Iona and south-west to Whithorn for anyone tracing Columba's mission.
• The English and Welsh shrines. Walsingham, Canterbury, Glastonbury and Holywell, which together tell the story of what was destroyed in the sixteenth century and what was restarted in the nineteenth and twentieth.

Practical Judgment, Not Logistics

This guide gives no opening times, no prices, no transport timetables and no tour operators, because those change and a page that carries them misleads people. Every site named here is run by somebody, a shrine, a diocese, a cathedral chapter, a state heritage service or a trust, and that body is the authority on access. Two things are worth deciding before you leave: where you will go to Mass and where you will go to confession, since several of the buildings in this guide belong to other Christian bodies and a Catholic pilgrimage that never reaches a Catholic altar has missed its own point. If travel is impossible, our guide to making a virtual pilgrimage from home sets out how the Church understands that.

The saints in this guide crossed water permanently for the sake of Christ. Columba left Ireland and did not go back. Aidan came south to a kingdom whose language he had to learn. Cuthbert went to an island the size of a field. Patrick returned to the country that had enslaved him. A pilgrimage that lasts a weekend is a small imitation of that, and the point of the small imitation is that it sends you home changed. Our Lord told the disciples that no one knows the day or the hour of the Son of Man's coming, and that they were therefore to stay awake (Mark 13:32-33). The readiness these places were built to serve is required now, and no one is promised the time to arrange it later.

21. Frequently Asked Questions