Isn’t that word “processional” a key element in all this? Very few “significant” landscapes could have been built as such, right from scratch, but many contain a number of significant points which were linked together either in reality and/or (more importantly) conceptually. Perhaps the remaining landscape gains significance merely because it cradles all this. I rather like Birmingham, but thinking about it, I suspect I like bits of Birmingham and I like the rest merely because it contains the bits and allows me to access them.

I’ve been on the Beatles tour in Liverpool (their houses and schools and where they met and Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields etc). To an avid fan, isn’t the whole of Liverpool a sacred landscape?

You mention that thirty disparate churches might one day be mis-identified as a single sacred landscape. But the problem is, if they were all the same denomination then to that particular set of people, who might have visited them all, they would indeed have had a collective significance. So by sheer luck the archaeologists of the future would have got it right (except for the fact that they’d probably lump a couple of synagogues into the bundle). I would have thought the Stonehenge area, being so complex and dating over such a long period, is particularly inappropriate to be given the title of sacred landscape as there are so many possibilities. Perhaps the term sacred landscape should be amended to sacred landscapes? Perhaps Michael Dames would have done well to adopt this humbler approach?

By taking X amount of points and joing them with a pilgramage we are creating a 'ritual landscape' - a landscape linked with ritual.

These patterns do not just involve turning up at certain places via any means. You can't take the high road while everyone else takes the low road. The whole route is part of the pilgramage - every step you take towards the next stop is part of it.

You have to follow a predefined set of stages and a predefined route. Different individual rituals occur at each station, but the whole journey is a ritual that is the sum of its parts, and the paths between these parts are also parts.

Just because I am talking about a Catholic pilgramage here doesn't mean that it's only 900 years old. In fact its use of rock outcrops, wells, tombs and standing stones throws it back at least 2000 years (which is pre-Xtianity in Ireland obviously).

The path to enlightenment is far more rewarding than enlightenment itself!