Welcome back to the Sunday Pilgrimage. I’m on my feet again after a couple of weeks of illness, and will be offering up these journeys to you every other Sunday from now on. Come the autumn, when my workload eases, I may return to weekly instalments, but let’s see how things go.

Last weekend, I told the story of St Govan, one of the ‘wild saints’ who will be featuring in my forthcoming book. Govan is one of the most mysterious of all the saints I’m writing about, and very little is known of him beyond his name. What we do know is that he was significant enough for a unique and intriguing Pembrokeshire shrine to be raised in his memory.

St Govan’s Chapel is unlike any other holy place I’ve come across in Britain, and yet it is entirely in keeping with the shrines of ascetic saints the world over. A wild location; a cell in the rock; a holy well; plenty of stories attached to its pedigree and history; miraculous powers - these can all be found here, as they can be found in the locations of holy hermits the world over.

What can’t be found here, though, is any solid indication of who St Govan actually was.

To find the chapel, you need to drive through a Ministry of Defence firing range, where tanks practice their manoeuvres. You can see their tread marks across the narrow road to the shore, along with the concrete buildings they use for test firing. For part of the year this whole area is closed to visitors and it’s impossible to visit the chapel. When I went along with my family last year, though, the guns were silent. Only the seagulls and the waves could be heard.

The chapel is reached by climbing down a winding and steep set of stone stairs which, legend has it, can never be correctly counted:

At the bottom of the steps, you find yourself level with the chapel’s roof. The building is literally wedged into a crack in the sandstone cliffs of South Wales, so that it looks as if it has grown from them :

Like St Govan himself, a mystery surrounds the chapel. It seems to have been built in the 13th or 14th century; and yet Govan is said to have lived in the 5th or 6th. The chapel was restored in the 1980s and today it receives a steady stream of tourists with cameras, like me. What it rarely seems to receive now is genuine pilgrims, or people in search of healing. This is 21st century Britain, after all. We don’t do that sort of thing any more. But long ago, we very much did: St Govan’s chapel was a place of pilgrimage - and, it is said, a place of miracles - for many centuries.

Inside, the chapel is damp, vaulted and spare. There is a small stone altar - just visible in the picture below.

To the left of the altar, through that little arched door, are a few stone steps that lead to this:

What’s going on here? Well, if you ask me this is the key to the mystery of why somebody built a chapel halfway up a cliff. This rocky cleft - a tiny cave, in essence - is today enclosed by the chapel, and is just behind its altar. Everything I have seen of the wild saints tells me that Govan is likely to have lived or slept or prayed in this cleft in the cliff during his lifetime. In all likelihood, the site would then have become a place of pilgrimage, and a chapel would have been built over the site in later centuries by medieval churchmen or pious locals.

Inside the chapel itself is a small spring or well, now enclosed by rough rocks. Perhaps this was for drinking, or perhaps it was holy water:

None of this, though, answers the primal question that St Govan’s Chapel tantalisingly poses: just who was St Govan? Sometimes we find, especially as far back as the 5th or 6th centuries, that the sources are silent. On this occasion, they are almost too noisy. They tell us a lot, but none of it is conclusive.

For a start, we have the saint’s name. This is variously said to be Govan, Gowan, Goven, Gofan, Gobin, Gobhan, Gwalchmai - a mythic Welsh hero - or even Giovanni, the Italianised version of John. Some believe he was a local disciple of St Eilfyw, who baptised Wales’s patron saint David. Others identify him with an Irish monk, Gobhan, who is mentioned in medieval manuscript as a companion of another Irish saint, Ailbe.

Best of all, though - as readers of last week’s story will already know - is the association of Govan with Gawain, knight of the Round Table and companion of the mythical King Arthur. St Govan’s Head was apparently once known as Sir Gawain’s Head, leading some to suggest that Gawain is in fact buried somewhere along this rocky shore:

Not that this explains the transformation of noble Sir Gawain into a wandering saint living in a crack in the rocks. The chances of Govan being Gawain - or indeed of Gawain actually existing in temporal reality - are probably zero, but facts like this should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story. As any writer will confirm, stories are much more important than so-called ‘reality.’

The most popular version of the story of Govan is that he was a wandering monk, possibly from Ireland, who pitched up in the wilds of Pembrokeshire and settled down to a hermit’s life. The seas back in those days were plagued with pirates and slavers - Irish pirates and slavers to be precise, of the kind who kidnapped St Patrick from Britain and took him by force to the land that would make his name. One day, it is said, Govan was menaced by a group of them, and they pursued him up the beach, intending to capture and sell him too. Luckily, a miraculous crack opened up in the rocks: Govan slipped into it, it closed again around him, and the pirates were foiled. This is the cleft in the cliff which we saw in the photo above. They say that if you look closely enough, you can still see the imprints of the saint’s ribs in the rock.

There’s an even more baroque story, by the way, which has it that the person who hid in the rocks from the pirates was not St Govan, but was none other than Jesus himself. Quite how he got to fifth century Pembrokeshire I’m not sure.

Whatever the truth of the matter, St Govan’s shrine was a significant pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages, and was renowned for its healing properties. Sick pilgrims would labour down the steep stairs to offer their prayers in the chapel, where, legend has it, Govan is buried beneath the altar. The Welsh historian Richard Fenton, writing in the 18th century, left behind a sniffy description of ‘the poorer sort of people’ who sought cures from the saint, of the kind that will be recognisable to anyone who followed my previous series about holy wells:

…in the cavity of a stone skirting the ascent about midway, [is] a little water, believed by the superstitious to be unfailing, but shrewdly suspected, by such as judge of things through an unprejudiced medium, to be adventitious. Many cures are supposed to be performed, by bathing the limbs here; and the place is frequented much in summer by the poorer sort of people from the interior, who leaving their votive crutches behind, to line the walls of the chapel, return restored to their limbs, which perhaps may be ascribed, with more justice, to change of air and the sea-breeze, than to any virtues inherent in this equivocal moisture, found in the stone basin and in the floor of the chapel.

Fenton, clearly a good modern protestant sort, goes on to lay out his opinion that ‘half the cures attributed to [such places] may be oftener placed to the account of a difference in air, diet, exercise, vacancy of mind, and regulations productive of greater temperance, than to any salutary properties in the waters themselves.’ In other words: it’s all woo woo. Not much changes, it seems, amongst either believers or sceptics, except perhaps the proportions of each.

But what is this ‘little water’ that Fenton refers to pilgrims bathing in? Lo and behold: it’s a holy well on the beach!

This is St Govan’s Well, and for many centuries it was used as holy wells so often are, as a place where pilgrims came seeking healing. Today, alas, the well is dry, but the wellhouse seems as solid and weatherproof as the chapel itself.

There’s one final tale about St Govan’s Chapel which we should note, and it concerns a bell. Early medieval saints, as we have seen before, often carried handbells. These were used to call monks to prayer in the days before steeples and bell ropes. In St Govan’s case, we hear that the saint used his bell to warn the locals of the approach of the pirates. In response, a group of pirates stole his bell one day and took it out to sea. Luckily, some angels retrieved the bell by force and brought it back to Govan on the shore, where they encased it in a rock that can still be seen on the beach, known as the ‘bell stone.’ Tap the stone, it is said, and the bell will ring out again, as loud as it ever did.

I tapped a few stones on the beach, but none of them sounded like a bell. I didn’t really know what I was looking for though, and anyway the wind was getting up. It was time to leave the chapel to its stories. Long may they fray and blow in wind and wave alike.