A Christo-Celtic reflection
Before the Romans laid down their straight roads, before their stones shaped the centres of Gloucester, Bath, and Cirencester, this land already held a story. A long, quiet, river-breathed story — older than empire, older than written history, older even than many of the myths that still shimmer beneath the surface of our hills and rivers.
Rarely do we talk much about that deep story.
Most of us walk the Gloucester streets admiring the Roman walls, unaware that the echoes beneath our feet belong not to Rome at all, but to the Dobunni — the first people of this land.
They lived here for centuries before the invaders ever dreamt of Britannia and they knew the Severn long before she was known by that name.
Over time they shaped the landscape gently, attentively, with that ancient instinct humans once carried: this earth is alive, and we must tread on her with courtesy.
The Dobunni farmed, traded, and made jewellery of astonishing delicacy. They honoured their rivers, tended their animals, and practiced a spirituality woven from land, water, wind and sky. Their presence shaped Gloucestershire, the Mendips, and the Somerset valleys in ways we barely notice — yet the land remembers. And so does the river.
Sabrina — the river with a soul
Long before Christianity reached these shores, the Severn was already a story.
She was Sabrina — the river-spirit, the one who flowed from the mountains of Plynlimon with the kind of fierce, wild purity that only three sister rivers could share. (The Wye and Rheidol were born alongside her, three daughters of a single mountain.)
In the old tales, Sabrina was thought of more as a boundary than a resource ( as is often the case today). She was seen as a presence, having watched the first peoples come and go, baring witness to their rituals, their griefs and their celebrations. And she'd have held their prayers whatever language they were spoken in.
When the Romans came, she continued to flow; and when the early Christians arrived, built their first chapels, and whispered their first psalms into the morning air, she still flowed.
Today, as we walk her banks or cross her bridges without a thought, she flows still. It seems to me as though there is here is a kind of holiness in that persistence.
Why remember these things now?
Well our age has remembered the Romans and forgotten the people who lived lightly on this land. Its as if we have remembered the empire but forgotten the earth. We know all about the history but where is our sense of reverence.
We have to wonder whether we are now paying the price for that forgetting.
The ecological crisis we face is far more than a a practical problem — though it is certainly that. It is a spiritual amnesia, a loss of relationship with the very ground that holds us. We have been living as though the earth is an object rather than a living communion, as though rivers are utilities rather than kin.
But the ancient people of these lands — the Dobunni, the Silures, the Dumnonii — carried a worldview we urgently need to recover. That is,
that we belong to the land, not the other way round. Remembering them has nothing to do with romanticising the past. It is about repairing the present and learning once again to walk the earth with tenderness.
Taking a leaf from the Dobunni's world view is about seeing rivers as living waters and understanding that the land is not a backdrop but instead a participant in our lives. We must re-awakening that relationship.
A Christo-Celtic way of seeing
When Christ came to these shores, carried by early missionaries who walked the old trackways and crossed the old rivers, the Gospel didn’t fall on empty ground rather it fell on soil already alive with spiritual imagination; a people who understood blessing, sacred place, and divine presence. And somehow, the Gospel and the land recognised each other.
To follow a Christo-Celtic path today is not to reject modernity or to adopt a set of romantic notions about “Celtic things.” It is to remember the deep memory of these islands. To honour the wisdom that was already here and to learn again that faith is not just something we believe but rather something we walk, breathe, taste, and touch.
Christ is not separate from creation; Christ suffuses it. The river is not separate from Spirit; the river reveals her. The land is not separate from prayer; the land is a chapel all her own.
Becoming people of the land again
I wonder then if the invitation of this moment - ecological, spiritual and cultural - is to become good ancestors. By that I mean to live with the same attentiveness as those first peoples. Honouring the flow of Sabrina and the quiet memory of the hills, learning once again what it means to belong.
When we remember who walked this land before us, we begin to remember who we are. For we ar not tourists in Gods creation, neither are we consumers of it but rather we are participants, caretakers and kin.
And maybe, just maybe, we can still rediscover the ancient art of living gently, reverently, beautifully upon the earth, as Sabrina gently flows, the land continues to listen and the invitation remains open
Blessings, Jayne