The hiking vicar guides me up a spiritual path
Peter Owen-Jones tells Tom Ough how he climbed 29,000 feet – without leaving England
e’re about to reach the top of Windover Hill. Peter Owen-Jones, the hippyish parish priest with a surfer’s blonde curls and an occasional TV presenting career, has been taking me on a hike. Along the way up, he’s been telling me all about the importance of walking high enough to see everyday life from an altered, spiritual perspective.
It’s a feeling of “liberation”, he promised me, and he wasn’t lying. The final, windswept slope is fairly barren apart from the 11 motionless Exmoor ponies watching us from behind a metal fence garlanded with barbed wire. Owen-Jones spots the horses, brown and watchful, and then sprints towards them, clambering over the fence, wire and all. Calling to them, he runs fast enough to scatter the herd into 11 fleeing individuals. He gives them brief chase before returning to the fence, grinning. Imagine doing that in a cassock.
Soon afterwards, we see the trig point, which is the concrete pillar, known in full as a triangulation station, that marks the top of the hill. Owen-Jones puts a naked knee to its top and hauls himself up. He stands up straight, the rubber soles of his walking boots squeaking on the pillar’s gritty surface. He turns to look at the huge sweep of Sussex countryside below, an agricultural patchwork of brown and green and rapeseed yellow. It’s what he calls “the plain”, a term that for OwenJones is as much psychological, referring to everything we do and think in our day-to-day, non-hiking existence, as topographical.
He’d explained this to me as we began our walk, striding up a chalky footpath on a Wednesday lunchtime. We’d decided to get to the top of the hill and then come back round the side of it to see the Long Man of Wilmington, a centuries-old hill figure outlined in white and 235ft tall. “Getting above the plain every day makes an incredible difference,” Owen-Jones had said. “I hadn’t understood that, what a difference it makes to step outside of that, outside of all of that imagining, all of that planning, all of that apparent presentation of normality. To step outside of that was a very good thing to do.”
He was talking about the 12 days of walking that form the basis of his new book, Everest England: 29,000 Feet in 12 Days. It’s ostensibly an account of his consecutive ascents of hills and mountains whose combined height matches that of Everest, but really, he says, it’s about finding respite and perspective. “If you’re stepping outside that cacophony of commerce, that’s going to create some space, and it’s going to bring to the surface that which needs attending to.”
This is the way Owen-Jones often speaks: “that which needs attending to”; “that which causes us pain”. It’s delivered in a deep, thoughtful RP that adds grandeur to pretty much anything he says, despite his resemblance to a retired surfing teacher. He could ask for a Kit-Kat at a corner shop and it’d sound like an invitation to communion.
He’s had a curious life, quitting his career in advertising in the Eighties to enrol at a theological college, Ridley Hall in Cambridge. He was ordained in 1993 and is now the rector of three village churches here in Sussex. The job, like those of many countryside clergy, is non-stipendiary; he lives in a rectory but receives no wage. “I’m completely f------ broke,” he tells me, with a rich giggle. “I grow most of my own food.”
Owen-Jones’s day job requires about two or three days’ work a week, which means he has time to walk almost every day. Other than that, he writes books, which began with an account of his switch to theological college and have continued with reflections on pilgrimage and being a parish priest. He has also presented several documentaries, mostly for BBC Two, in which he has examined the history of British Christianity and adopted the lifestyles of monks and ascetics of various religious stripes. Compared to that last one, Extreme Pilgrim, Everest England seems fairly sedate, but the idea behind it had an unusual genesis. “I just kind of woke up in the night and there it was. Just walk up the height of Everest. Why? Well I know why now, I didn’t understand why then.”
Walking up hills, he came to realise, allows us to process pain rather than evade it. He wasn’t suffering himself, he says, but over the 12 days, in which he was almost always alone and avoided using his phone or listening to the radio, he came to understand this mechanism better. At some time or other, he says, “all of us in our lives kind of come to a full stop, get to a point where we’re exhausted, where we’ve run out of fuel, get to a point when we’re just thinking: ‘Do I really want to get up and go to work again today?’”
Such a feeling, he says, “is just part of the human journey. The thing about walking up the height of Everest, or walking from here to Edinburgh, is that it gives you a chance to really reassess, to open up. You can go and spend 12 days lying on a beach on a Greek island, or you can actually take on a quest, and I think there are times in our lives when a quest is really needed.”
He teaches me the St Augustine dictum “Solvitur ambulando” – “It is solved by walking.” I can see in principle how the phrase has some truth. There’s an increasing amount of research demonstrating the precise mechanisms by which nature makes us feel better, much as exercise has a range of mental as well as physical benefits. I can see it work in practice too; having arrived in Sussex stressed, and irritated with Owen-Jones for changing the plan several times, I was relaxed and happy (and forgiving: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye) by the time we reached the top.
He’d talked about the “liberation” of this kind of walking, and he explains what he meant. “We’ve had to make square fields to produce food, and we’ve had to tame horses and we’ve had to build roads, all of these things we’ve had to do. There is also a part of ourselves that doesn’t actually belong to any of that process. There’s a part of ourselves,” he says, building up the off-the-cuff rhetoric, “that isn’t a part of all of that. There is a part of ourselves that really is much closer to the rain and to the sunlight and to the tarns, high up in the mountains. And we are also part of that and that is also part of us.”
Once he’s jumped down from the trig point, he gets me to climb it too. For a moment, I feel closer to the mountains than the plain.
‘I just woke up in the night with the idea. I didn’t understand why then, but I do now’
‘You can spend 12 days lying on a beach in Greece, or you can take on a quest’