Pilgrim’s Journal — Pembrokeshire: St Govan's Chapel

When I first saw photographs of St Govan's Chapel, I knew I wanted to visit.

There was something about it that called to me.

Tucked between towering limestone cliffs and reached by a long flight of stone steps, it felt less like somewhere you simply arrived at and more like somewhere you gradually entered.

I set off early that first morning of the pilgrimage.

It was March, and I hadn't seen another person since waking.

As I descended the steps, the chapel slowly revealed itself below.

Small.

Humble.

Almost hidden within the cliffs.

When I stepped inside, I stopped.

The morning sun was pouring through the little window overlooking the sea, filling the tiny chapel with a soft golden light.

My eyes were drawn there immediately.

I stood quietly for a while, simply taking it in.

Looking out through that small stone window, the sea seemed impossibly beautiful.

The light, the silence and the view all came together in a way that made the little chapel feel much larger than its walls.

It wasn't difficult to understand why this place had been cherished for centuries.

Eventually I stepped back outside.

Only then did I begin to appreciate the setting as a whole.

The cliffs rose high above the chapel on either side, embracing it completely.

Beyond the natural rock arch, the sea breathed steadily against the shore.

It felt as though the chapel belonged to the landscape rather than standing apart from it.

I found a place to sit in front of the chapel and stayed there for quite a long time.

Listening to the waves.

Watching the birds drift on the sea breeze.

Enjoying the rare gift of complete solitude.

It felt less like visiting a historic site than being welcomed into a sanctuary.

Not one created by the chapel alone, but by the whole landscape.

At some point I took out my camera and recorded a short video.

Nothing elaborate.

Just a quiet record of the morning.

While I was filming, a little burst of sea spray reached me.

I remember smiling.

My heart already felt completely full, and something about that gentle spray felt almost like the sea itself whispering,

"I'm with you."

I carried on filming without another thought.

This was the next thing I recorded.

It wasn't until much later, watching the footage back, that I realised the spray had also landed on the camera lens.

The droplets had caught the sunlight in such a way that, for a few moments, they formed a shape that immediately reminded me of the vesica piscis.

As the light shifted, delicate rainbow-like orbs appeared above the natural stone arch opening towards the sea.

I watched it several times.

Whether anyone else would experience it as I did almost didn't matter.

I had already experienced that moment as a blessing.

The footage simply revealed something I hadn't known it had captured.

To me, the vesica piscis became a visible echo of an experience I had already lived.

I experienced it as a quiet affirmation that the moment had been every bit as real as it had felt.

Afterwards I wandered around the rocks surrounding the chapel.

That's when I noticed something half-buried in the mud.

It looked different from the rocks around it.

Curious, I knelt down and gently worked it free.

It was a shell.

Later I discovered it was a dog whelk.

I'd never knowingly found one before.

I rinsed away the mud with a little water from my bottle.

My first thought made me laugh.

"I've just dug up a hermit's shell outside a hermit's chapel."

The connection felt wonderfully fitting.

For years I had lived a quiet, almost hermit-like life in my little cabin on the edge of Woodland Glade.

Perhaps that was why St Govan's had spoken to me so deeply from the very beginning.

Then another layer quietly emerged.

Whether carried by the dog whelk that created it or later borrowed by a hermit crab, the shell represented the same simple truth.

Home could be carried.

Only a day earlier, Church Rock had begun teaching me that home wasn't somewhere we possess but something we cultivate through relationship.

Now that lesson returned in an entirely different form.

This time, it spiralled into the palm of my hand.

Looking back, I don't think the greatest gift of St Govan's Chapel was simply the chapel itself.

It was the way everything seemed to belong together.

The chapel.

The cliffs.

The sea.

The arch.

The shell.

None of them competed for attention.

Each quietly revealed another layer of the same conversation.

Pilgrimage, I was beginning to realise, wasn't simply about travelling to sacred places.

It was about allowing those places to reshape the way I saw the world.

Sometimes that happened through a shaft of morning light.

Sometimes through a rainbow caught in a drop of sea spray.

And sometimes through a small shell, gently lifted from the mud, reminding me that perhaps the deepest sanctuary we ever discover is the one we learn to carry with us.