If you can’t make it for an actual physical walking pilgrimage this year, then have an armchair one instead, and reflect on what you read, by walking somewhere local!
Pilgrimages have been taken by millions of people over the years, retracing the steps of saints to sinners, and reflecting on what can be learned by putting one step in front of the other, and getting in touch with God.
Wayfarer is a highly-reviewed book, from a young woman who quit her dream job, ended a long-term relationship and headed home to North Wales, before deciding to walk the most famous pilgrimage in the world – Camino de Santiago in northern Spain.
She then almost by accident found herself walking some of Britain’s oldest pilgrim paths, ending up confronting pasta traumas, that she thought she had laid to rest.
Not a religious book, it shows how a walking pilgrimage had Phoebe revisit the feelings of losing her mother as a teenager to surviving toxic relationships, an eating disorder and depression. She reveals how nature and walking helped to heal past wounds, offering a path that she did not existed.
Great Pilgrim Routes of Britain & Europe looks at 10 popular pilgrim routes on the continent. The cathedral at Santiago de Compostela now records 200,000 visitors a year, on the famed pilgrim route through France and Spain. In this book, the author visits the classic route, along with nine others.
From England’s own St Cuthbert’s Way (which winds through the holy island of Lindisfarne and across the Scottish borders) to an historic route in Germany and Vai Francigena (from Italy to Switzerland).
A Book Retracing Walking Paths of Others
Doubling Back is an updated edition of a classic book published 10 years ago, as the author ‘doubles back’ to follow in the footsteps of others, walking paths across the ‘holy island’ of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, the Isle of Skye, Norway and Kenya.
Following paths of writers and relatives gone before, Linda charts how places in writing and memory create ‘wrinkles in time’ and geography that allow us to walk in the footsteps of others.
Join her, as she cross the Swiss Alps to retrace the mountaineering past of the father she barely knew, follows the escape route of a Norwegian scientist on the run in the Second World War, of simply celebrate the joy found in ‘friendly paths’ of her local regular terrain, and the ritual of returning home.
This revised edition includes an account of a new journey through northern Scotland’s Flow Country (the peatland that is our chief carbon store).
I’m here on a writing retreat, and each day for a month is my own. Already I have established rituals. I like to be first to the kitchen, to collect the fresh loaves left hanging on the little side door that opens onto the village street.
After a glass of orange juice, I put on my shoes and slip into the garden, pass the lavender bushes fussed over by small white butterflies and scrambling with bees. At the bottom of the sloping lawn, a wicket gate opens into the wider world.
Linda Cracknell is a writer on the natural world, and also writes radio scripts. This book was serialised for BBC Radio. All her writing is inspired by place, and she also teaches nature writing.
Wonderfully explores the strange durability of the paths that we make in our lives, in our dreams and after our deaths. Robert Macfarlane
Not so much a book to inspire you to do her walks, but to challenge you to enjoy your own walks more. Sara Maitland
A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain
On This Holy Island follows travel writer Oliver Smith, as he seeds to radically reframe our idea of ‘pilgrimage’ by retracing sacred routes from across time – from climbing into remote sea caves, sleeping inside Neolithic tombs, scaling forgotten holy mountains and once marooning himself at sea.
Following holy roads to churches, cathedrals and standing tones, this book explores how even football stadiums and musical festivals, are now contemporary places of pilgrimages.
And although the routes walked are often ancient, the pilgrims he meets today are always modern. But wherever you go and whoever you meet, ‘the unravelling of a path, goes in tandem with the unravelling of the soul’.
How Pilgrimage Changed the World
Holy Places looks at how pilgrimages have changed the world. For thousands of years, pilgrimages have been walks of faith and sometimes political acts.
The author follows the trail through 19 sacred sites, from the templates of Jerusalem to the banks of the River Ganges in India, by way of Lourdes in France.
Do People Get Cured at Lourdes (France)?
The best known pilgrimage site in the world is likely the French town of Lourdes, where many sick or disabled Catholics visit the shrine, in the hope of miraculous cures? Of course, the question is do they? And if someone does get cured, why don’t all the others?
Situated at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains, the town itself has just 15,000 people but around 5 million people visit each year, in the hope of receiving a miracle cure. It is here that it’s said the Virgin Mary appeared in a vision to a young teenage peasant girl who was eventually made into St Bernadette by the Pope.
She had several visions near a well (which is where people visit to bathe or drink the waters). And although she herself died young from TB, her body was exhumed more than once, with people amazed that she was almost mummified, rather than her body decomposed.
Since the visions at Lourdes, there have been some confirmed ‘miracles’ at Lourdes, but only 70 (not many considering the millions of people who visit). Others say that it is the faith and prayer, rather than the water, that may have helped.
Critics say that the huge prices charged to often vulnerable families with children in wheelchairs for life, has made a mockery of religion. The town generates almost £300 million in profits, often for luxury hotels. The so-called ‘Disneyland of God’ the town sells glow-in-the-dark statues of the Virgin Mary along with plastic bottles of ‘healing water’.
