‘Going Around and Connecting Dots: Landscape Monuments and Pilgrimage-Tourism in Wales and Celtic Britain’

5B - Management Issues

Celtic Britain, especially Wales, is unusually well-served by the extent to which landscape monuments of medieval and modern religion have been catalogued and recorded. Significant recorded data-sets for pilgrimage include early and medieval inscribed stones, holy wells, and saints’ dedications. Influential geographical studies have created both explicit and implicit routes of connection between many of these. These data-sets and narratives have played, and continue to play, substantial roles in development of interpretations and routes created for religious tourism. This presentation, reflecting on a number of case-studies of trails and sites, will (mostly) resist the historian’s instinctive interest in deconstruction on points of authenticity, though we will see that there is room for reflection on resource-gathering and whether interpretation projects consistently accesses a critical knowledge base. The analysis will focus on identifying those aspects of contemporary uses of monuments and narratives that offer potential to further develop the religious dimension of pilgrimage tourism. It will also offer some reflections on the problems of accommodating a diversity of faith and heritage issues in religious uses of sites.