On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain

Bloomsbury Continuum 256pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99

The travel writer Oliver Smith is not your typical pilgrim, said Caroline Eden in the Financial Times. Although his new book is about a dozen pilgrimage destinations and the spiritual seekers who are drawn to them, he is avowedly “not religious”. He decided to embark on a journey after losing his job at Lonely Planet magazine. A plan to tramp Spain’s Camino de Santiago was scuppered by the pandemic, so he settled instead on visiting an “array of hallowed places” around Great Britain, from Iona to Glastonbury Tor (pictured). Along the way, he ventured to various other spots, such as Britain’s most remote pub, and – as he recounts in this book – made some “Bill Bryson-like pit stops involving Welcome Breaks and Ginsters pasties”. His aim, he says, was to “travel deeper, not further” – while “using my P45 as a pillow”.

“Smith has written something special,” said Patrick Galbraith in The Times. He describes meetings with a “cornucopia” of people and a fascinating range of places. Often the picture he paints is of “British faith at its most eccentric”. But whether he is connecting with our “ancient spiritual past”, or joining Liverpool fans on a “pilgrimage” to Anfield, this “excellent travelogue” is “rich with information, historical detail and descriptive prose”. It is certainly well written, said Guy Stagg in The Spectator, and Smith “works hard” to separate the facts from the “colourful stories” about the places he visits. But like him, many of the pilgrims he meets have no actual faith; they are just in search of some kind of meaning. “I wonder if something’s lost when pilgrimage is stripped of any religious content beyond a vague sense of the numinous.” After all, “if there’s no attempt at inner transformation, it simply becomes a lofty word for a walk”.