Symbols - What does heaven look like
Sacred geography
The UK and Europe as a whole is blessed with an enormous number of tumuli, cairns, mounds, baileys, wells, standing stones, stone circles, mark stones, ponds, moated islands, posts, barrows, and similar remnants of lost civilisations. Most of these predate Celtic history and may even predate Neolithic times. The generic name given to most of these is ‘prehistoric site’. Quite a large number of these are still recognised as being sacred, the sacredness of other sites has long since passed out of human memory and legend.
The combination of the sacred sites and the lines that link them form a sort of sacred geography, a sacred geography that certainly exists in Europe, but also exists all over the world, as such sites and straight line roads exist on every continent.
A sacred landscape maps spiritual features and symbols onto the physical landscape using a mix of naturally occurring features and sites which have spiritual 'power'.
The objective of all sacred landscapes was to recreate heaven on earth - to recreate the symbols and features seen in spiritual experience using the physical landscape, thus reminding people of both spiritual truths but also guiding them to places where such experience could be obtained.
It had the added benefit that if a person was unable to gain spiritual experience, then at least he had some approximate idea of what others had seen and experienced from the physical recreation of it. The landscape at one time must have been immensely beautiful as a result.