All hail the pandemic pilgrimage boom
‘Church walking’ has replaced strolls to the pub as all-comers look for a dose of history with their hike, says Peter Stanford
After more than a year of living under the cloud of Covid, when one stroll a day was our only officially permitted exercise, this Bank Holiday weekend you might understandably decide you are sick of walking. But how about a walk that isn’t just a walk, but a pilgrimage?
There used to be nothing nicer than going for a long walk on a Bank Holiday with the promise of a pint at the end. But when the pubs closed, necessity gave rise to an alternative reason to stretch our legs. Thus, to give purpose and meaning to that daily perambulation, people began inviting friends to pack sandwiches and a hip flask for a stroll to a nearby church or chapel, a pastime that has since been nicknamed “church walking”. If the interiors were out of bounds, at least the building could be admired and the grounds explored.
Before the pandemic, pilgrimages were becoming popular, and with all-comers. More than half of those walking the Camino trail towards the Spanish shrine city of Santiago de Compostela describe themselves as not having any particular denomination or faith.
Something similar has been triggered on these shores. Old pilgrim trails from north Wales to Norfolk, Dorset to Durham, Galloway to Glastonbury have, this past decade, been dusted down, given new signs and attracted as diverse a crowd as the Camino. There are those wanting a decent hike in the countryside, those keen to explore history and those intrigued by the prospect of getting away from it all on trails associated with the search for a deeper meaning to life.
Such “journeys with meaning”, as modern pilgrimage might be characterised, can be as simple as a walk across fields to an ancient church. Sir Diarmaid Macculloch, the Oxford historian, spoke recently in a BBC Radio 3 essay on solitude about his “church crawls”. These wanderings to look at old, often little used churches were, he joked, “an experience resembling a pub crawl”.
Tour operators on the Santiago pilgrimage trail have reported a rise in interest from solo travellers, saying they are craving time and space to “have a good think about things”. But there has also been a “big upsurge” in interest in north Wales, reports the Venerable Chris Potter, who, with his wife, Jenny, has revived the old pilgrims’ way there. The couple spent three months in 2009 on the Camino. Its lasting effect inspired them to resurrect the 140-mile North Wales Pilgrim Path. “All that walking and looking at the world was more of a meditative, emptying process of letting go and letting things happen. It was truly life-changing,” says Potter.
That sounds like an antidote to life under lockdown, where every social interaction had to be planned, justified and choreographed. And if the past 14 months can claim to have changed us, it has surely been by making us more conscious of how precious life is.
The appeal of pilgrimage now, then, is that it offers a chance to explore that realisation further. “Pilgrimage,” suggests Dr Guy Hayward, director and co-founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust in 2014, “has, from time immemorial, been a practice that offers a literal physical path with a clear destination that helps to give structure to our more intangible search for our inner direction. It gives us experiences rather than advice, and we can bounce off these to create a new or renewed sense of purpose.”
His organisation’s website, he says, has had almost 700,000 visits in the past year, with many downloading maps. “There are holy, wholesome, holistic places along pilgrimage routes all around us in Britain,” he says. “They are outdoors or in big open spaces, and so are Covid-safe, given they are usually separate from the more populated tourist destinations.”
In other words, perfect if you are craving escape from your usual circuit round the local park this weekend.
Pilgrimage: Journeys of Meaning by Peter Stanford (Thames and Hudson, £25) is out now. Buy for £19.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514