The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [83]
So inspiring was the experience of being dropped off three days away from home, and then just walking back, taking in familiar sights from wholly new angles, I rang my dad to see if he fancied doing exactly the same across our home county of Worcestershire. We did it the next week, my step-mum dropping us off in the Wyche Gap, that ancient pass through the Malvern Hills that marks the border with Herefordshire: a sublime experience that I’ll cover at a later point.
If there is one path that I would encourage anyone to try, it’s this, and every one is bespoke and unique. Beg a lift, take the train or bus, and land two or three days’ walk away from home. Turn back, and start walking. Stay in a B&B only ten miles from your front door. See your own back yard in a completely new context. It’s the ultimate staycation – and a great way of realising too that for a good walk, you really don’t need too much Stuff.
Chapter 7
AND DID THOSE FEET
Stairway to heaven: ascending Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, Ireland
With the exception of the Coast to Coast, which had been a glimpse into one hall of my own particular hell, every path I’d walked so far had put me in a far more spiritually robust frame of mind. I was keen now to try some paths with an explicitly divine identity, in particular to undertake an organised pilgrimage. With that as the aim, you want to go for the jugular. Although I am normally quite a loner when it comes to walking, when I thought about undertaking a proper pilgrimage route, one of the most important factors to my mind was the presence of others, and preferably in cacophonous multitude. A few years ago, in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a Basque bulwark of a town on the French side of the Pyrenees, I’d been genuinely moved and amazed at the sight of the legion of pilgrims starting their journey there on the Camino of St James to Santiago de Compostela, nearly 500 miles away on the Atlantic coast of Galicia. They looked so purposeful, excited and united in their mission, and that’s what I wanted next. Despite – or perhaps because of – our technological advancement, we seem to need pilgrimage more than ever. 2,491 people completed the Camino in 1985. By 1995, this had jumped to 19,821, and it now easily tops 100,000 a year.
I considered the options nearer home. What about the original great pilgrimage route, as portrayed by Geoffrey Chaucer over seven centuries ago in The Canterbury Tales? His motley band of pilgrims, covering all bases from the devout to the debased, caroused their way across Kent from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to St Thomas à Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Although the express intention of the trip was meek obeisance to the Christian principles of confession and redemption, it was all conducted with feet firmly scuffed into the earth, the sacred and the profane inseparably commingled. That seems to be an essential ingredient in a good pilgrimage: devotion and wonder, for sure, but with the option of a little light drunkenness and debauchery too.
Aside from the fact that it might bring back unpleasant flash-backs from my A levels, I quickly dismissed the idea of following Chaucer. His pilgrims’ most likely route from Southwark to Canterbury was along the Roman Watling Street. This is now the A2 and assorted other trunk roads of varying ferocity, and I wasn’t much struck on the idea of plodding through Dartford, Gravesend and the sprawl of Medway towns while ingesting the fumes of countless Polish and Latvian lorries. I pondered a pilgrimage route to England’s most famous Catholic shrine, Walsingham in Norfolk. A few folk walk there from Ely Cathedral, a 73-mile tramp under the vast skies of the Fens. The route appealed hugely,