Some heritage was never built. It was found, and then watched, named, sung to, and protected. This room is for the geography that holds a culture's cosmology in its hills, rivers and groves.
A sacred grove in Yorubaland. A confluence on the Ganges. A cleft in a granite outcrop in the Australian desert. These are not backdrops to culture, they are the texts themselves, read and re-read by the communities who keep them.
Our sacred landscapes programme works at the intersection of cultural preservation and environmental stewardship. We document the meaning of a place alongside its ecology, because the two are, in almost every tradition we work in, the same study.
Access to several sites featured here is restricted by local custodians. Where this is the case, we have published only what they asked us to share.
Sacred mountains and groves are some of the planet's oldest protected areas. We document them with custodian permission, recording the rituals of approach, the species held within, and the rules of behaviour that have kept them intact for centuries.
Rivers and shorelines hold the busiest spiritual traffic of any landscape. We work along ritual riverbanks and pilgrimage coastlines, documenting the seasonal rhythms of bathing, offering, naming and return.
Standing stones, observatories, horizon markers. We document landscapes where the sky is part of the architecture, and where a culture's calendar, agriculture and theology depend on the same slow rotation overhead.
A sacred place is a place a community has agreed, across generations, to behave differently inside of.
Some heritage was never built. It was found, and then watched, named, sung to, and protected. This room is for the geography that holds a culture's cosmology in its hills, rivers and groves.
A sacred grove in Yorubaland. A confluence on the Ganges. A cleft in a granite outcrop in the Australian desert. These are not backdrops to culture, they are the texts themselves, read and re-read by the communities who keep them.
Our sacred landscapes programme works at the intersection of cultural preservation and environmental stewardship. We document the meaning of a place alongside its ecology, because the two are, in almost every tradition we work in, the same study.
Access to several sites featured here is restricted by local custodians. Where this is the case, we have published only what they asked us to share.
Sacred mountains and groves are some of the planet's oldest protected areas. We document them with custodian permission, recording the rituals of approach, the species held within, and the rules of behaviour that have kept them intact for centuries.
Rivers and shorelines hold the busiest spiritual traffic of any landscape. We work along ritual riverbanks and pilgrimage coastlines, documenting the seasonal rhythms of bathing, offering, naming and return.
Standing stones, observatories, horizon markers. We document landscapes where the sky is part of the architecture, and where a culture's calendar, agriculture and theology depend on the same slow rotation overhead.
A sacred place is a place a community has agreed, across generations, to behave differently inside of.