The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
They knew something was missing
What compels pilgrims, religious or secular, to leave normal life behind – and take ‘a really long walk’?
PILGRIMAGE by Peter Stanford 240pp, Thames & Hudson, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £17.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
For Celtic Christians of the first millennium, Bardsey Island, off the Llŷn Peninsula in Wales, was a place at the end of this world and thus closer to the next. Getting there (or even trying to) was a physical as well as a spiritual endeavour: a long tramp through North Wales via low-lying churches and sacred wells to Aberdaron, and then a crossing by coracle of one of the most perilous stretches of water in the British Isles.
The crossing can still be rough, but these days it’s on a sturdy motor launch. You can print out point-topoint directions. In 2019, some 600 people set out on the revived, 135mile North Wales Pilgrim’s Way – or the “Welsh Camino”. Why?
Evelyn Davies, vicar of Aberdaron for eight years in the early 2000s, asked herself that question. Year on year, she had seen an increase in people turning up at her church and asking how to reach Bardsey. “Some,” she recalled, “were straightforward tourists, but many were not. Many were not necessarily, or even often, Christian, but they knew something was missing that was not to be found in the materialism that the world offers as a cure-all.” The search for that missing something is at the centre of Pilgrimage by Peter Stanford, who couldn’t be better qualified as a guide. Raised a Catholic, he has edited the Catholic Herald and has written studies of Judas, Martin Luther and angels. He describes himself as a man of “modest residual faith laced with lashings of curiosity”. In Pilgrimage, he shows how paths and practices have changed (or endured) over the centuries, and explores “the new geography of spiritual power” – whatever it is that makes people itch, as Martin Sheen puts it in the 2010 film The Way, to take “a really long walk”.
Among his waypoints are the Inca Trail in Peru, which ends at a once-lost city now found by 1.5 million visitors a year, and the Shikoku path in Japan, which circles 88 temples in the footsteps of the Buddhist monk Kukai. He takes in Lourdes and Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca (which every Muslim must visit at least once, but where “the new generation of unaffiliated [ie non-Muslim] pilgrims, for now, is not welcome”) and, of course, Santiago de Compostela, end point in northwestern Spain of a “camino” that’s rather better known than the one in Wales. In 2019, 347,578 people collected their compostela, the certificate confirming they have followed
the Camino de Santiago for at least the last 100 kilometres (62.5 miles).
A new generation of pilgrims, Stanford says, is in pursuit of four Es: Exercise, Exploration, Environment and Escape. Some find, or renew, a faith along the way. Some join in the hope of good company. But a few go it alone. Mildred Norman walked away from the end of her marriage in her mid-40s and along the Appalachian Trail from New England to Georgia in 1952. Somewhere on it – with the Korean War raging and the McCarthy era at its height – she experienced a vision that would keep her walking. Six times, up to her death in 1981, she crossed North America in a blue tunic whose hand-stitched letters said “Peace Pilgrim”. In her view, a pilgrim’s job was “to rouse people from apathy and make them think”.
Pilgrimages is a useful primer in itself (though maps would have been helpful), with suggestions for further reading. I would add Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, a rollicking reworking of Chaucer for the 21st century that’s full, as the prologue has it, of “verbal feats from the streets of the South-East”.
Stanford opens with a passage about visiting Lourdes on a school trip at 17, and closes with a journey he made to El Salvador in 2019. In between, there are a couple of descriptive passages – on the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, and on Bodh Gaya in India, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment – that suggest he is writing from experience as much as research, but he doesn’t say so.
There’s a tantalising reference to how visits to war cemeteries “have been part of my own pilgrimages”. I’d like to have read more. But perhaps Stanford is following, in more ways than one, the lead of the Buddha, who stressed that what was important was not where he had gone, or how he had felt, but his teachings about “right life”, which Stanford summarises as “a path of great antiquity towards enlightenment that had been travelled by human beings long before him”.