Pilgrimage
Our urge to walk far and think deep is as old as the hills – and interest in pilgrimage as an answer to life’s big questions is soaring.
Walking things out.
ACROSS CONTINENTS, ACROSS cultures, across faiths, pilgrimage has a long, global history. Millions of Muslims journey to Mecca, Buddhists to Bodh Gaya, and Christians to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Pilgrimage is both about a sacred destination, and a journey that furnishes time to think and pray, slowly pass through and absorb fresh places, meet new people in a meaningful context, and challenge yourself physically and mentally in a way that can be life-changing for the spirit.
Its roots are religious but faith isn’t a prerequisite and pilgrimage has always attracted a diverse range of characters. Chaucer’s band of Medieval pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales ranged from the devout to the debauched, and it was well documented that release from the everyday grind could persuade even the temperate to rowdiness, evidenced by the saying ‘go a pilgrim, return a whore’.
Chaucer’s friar, squire, monk and miller were headed to what is arguably the epicentre of pilgrimage in Britain. St Augustine arrived from Rome and established a mission at Canterbury in 597, but it is the cathedral where Thomas Becket was murdered by Henry II’s henchmen in 1170 that draws the most pilgrims. At one time it was more visited than any European shrine outside Rome, and together with St Augustine’s abbey and St Martin’s church, it is now a World Heritage site. The Becket relics saved from the ravages of the Reformation are housed in the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, and the church of St Dunstan contains the head of the martyr St Thomas More, to give this Kentish city five notable places of worship. It is also now the culmination of the 153-mile Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester, or a 90-mile variation from Southwark in London.
Whatever your belief there is meaning and connection in treading the same routes
as thousands of walkers over thousands of years, as they thought and prayed on every human sorrow and joy, trouble and dream. Walsingham in Norfolk, and the islands of Iona in Scotland, Bardsey in Wales, and Lindisfarne in Northumberland, are just a few of the hundreds of places in Britain renowned for their spiritual significance, or you could choose to devise a route to a place with a very particular meaning to you alone.
It’s hard to imagine a time when we’ve been readier for the succour and peace a pilgrimage can bring. And it doesn’t have to be hundreds of miles, for much of the meaning is in the intent, as the British Pilgrimage Trusts suggests to those about to start out: ‘Set your intention for the journey at the beginning – this can be a question you want help with, or something to bring into or let go of, in your life.’
“Whatever your belief there is meaning and connection in treading the same routes as thousands of walkers over thousands of years…”