Rites of way: behind the pilgrimage

revival
Robert MacfarlaneFirst published on Fri 15 Jun 2012 22.54 BST
The poet Edmund Blunden wrote in 1942: "We have been increasingly on pilgrimage." We
are once again increasingly on pilgrimage. A revival is under way worldwide, with pilgrim
numbers rising even as church-going figures fall. Medieval hostelries on the roads to
Santiago de Compostela, closed for centuries, are reopening to cater to the volume of
travellers. In 1985, 2,491 people received the certificate of completion known as la
autentica; more than 270,000 did so in 2010. On the little north Norfolk village of
Walsingham – site of an 11th-century vision of the Virgin Mary, recently self-branded as
"England's Nazareth" – a quarter of a million pilgrims now converge each year, including
participants in the "children's pilgrimage", the "youth pilgrimage" and the "Tamil
pilgrimage". Last year's hajj to Mecca was the most populous ever. At the 2010 Kumbh Mela,
the Indian space agency took satellite pictures of the tens of millions of pilgrims in order to
improve the government's crowd control at future melas. Rowan Williams spoke recently of
"a whole generation of new pilgrims … wishing to cut through the clutter of institutions, and
achieve self-discovery in a new place".
Across faiths and denominations, down the green lanes of England, along the dusty roads of
Spain, up the cobbled streets of Alpine towns, through the marl deserts of Israel and the
West Bank, around the sacred peaks of the Himalayas, over the frozen lakes of Russia and
along the holy rivers of India, millions of pilgrims are on the move: bearing crosses, palm
branches, flaming torches, flower garlands, prayer flags and over-stuffed rucksacks,
clutching scuffed wooden staffs or shiny trekking poles, and tramping, prostrating,
hobbling, begging and believing their ways onwards, travelling by aeroplane, car, bus,
horseback and bicycle, but most often on foot and over considerable distances – for physical
hardship remains a definitive aspect of most pilgrimage: arduous passage through the outer
landscape prompting subtle exploration of the inner.
This pilgrimage revival is not only religious in nature; it also extends widely and
fascinatingly into secular culture and art. Writing Britain, this summer's British Library
exhibition about landscape and literature, teems with pilgrims and their peregrinations,
from Chaucer's convivial chevaliers onwards. Chaucer began the first of his Canterbury tales
625 years ago: to mark the anniversary, a group recently re-walked the route from the
Tabard Inn in Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral in Kent. They stayed in the original
stopover towns, read and re-enacted the tales along the way, and recorded their journey
in multimedia form as it unfolded. Later this month a weekend-long arts festival dedicated
to pilgrimage will take place at Mount Amelia in Norfolk, involving poetry, opera, film,
performance, photography, sculpture, improvised jazz and storytelling.
Certainly the most influential work of travel writing published in the past 20 years is WG
Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, whose original German subtitle was Eine englische Wallfahrt –
"An English Pilgrimage". Told in winding and digressive sentences, and studded with
captionless black-and-white photographs, the book recounts a foot-journey taken by a
narrator who closely resembles (but is not quite) Sebald himself, down the crumbling
coastline of Suffolk in the "dog days" of summer. Place, in Sebald's pilgrimage, presses hard
upon the walker: the paranoid East Anglian coast, fortified for thousands of years against
various kinds of invasion (sea-walls, Martello towers, pill-boxes, radar stations, cold war
listening posts), induces first joy, then fascination, then neurosis and at last breakdown.
The Rings of Saturn has provoked its own cult, and its own metapilgrimages. This year saw
the international premiere and success of Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee's feature film
tracing the book's itinerary and its stories. I walked the route myself over several days
several summers ago, when starting to write an oblique biography of Sebald. My hope was
that by means of footstepping his shade, I would understand the man and his work better.
But the sun was hot, children were having fun in the fountains at Lowestoft, and in the end I
gave myself up to the pleasures of the walk. Somewhere near Benacre Broad I plunged into
the warm waves to wash off the grayscale of the Sebaldian worldview; a few months later I
abandoned the book project entirely (and straightaway felt better about life).
Last year Colin Thubron published To a Mountain in Tibet, an austere and moving account of
his journey to Kailash in western Tibet, the holiest peak of the Himalayas, where the Ganges,
the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej all have their source, and around whose base
pilgrims have long made circuits of notorious difficulty. The most extreme form of this kora,
or circumambulation, requires body-length prostrations for 32 miles of rocky path, at up to
18,000ft in altitude. Thubron made his own secular pilgrimage in memory of his recently
deceased mother, and he circled the mountain on foot with Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and
Bonpos as his chance companions. Incomprehension and cold comfort were the chief yields
of his journey, though, and the book hums with strange loneliness and grief – a different
dark pilgrimage to set alongside Sebald's.
Also last year the writer-artists Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn completed The Road North, a
project inspired by the 17th-century Japanese pilgrim-poet Matsuo Bashō, who perfected
the haibun form of prose-poetry as a means of recording the thousands of miles he
wandered through Japan. Guided by the example of Bashō, Finlay and Cockburn followed
their own narrow roads through Scotland, stopping at 53 "stations" and creating a vast
"word-map" of the country, made up of prose-poems, renga, hokku and blog posts. Another
Scottish work, Nan Shepherd's delicate meditation on place and psyche, The Living
Mountain, is finding a new readership, 60 years after it was written and 35 years after it was
first published. "I believe that I now understand," concludes Shepherd, "why the Buddhist
goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the
god is sought."
The artist Richard Long continues to make his epic walks, distinguished by their rites of way
(a flint carried from one coast to another, stones or sticks left in patterns by the roadside),
and pilgrimage remains vital to the practice of other influential sculptors and artists:
Hamish Fulton, for instance, whose book Wild Life records the hundred days of ritual walks
he has undertaken in the Cairngorm massif (a circumambulation of Ben Macdui on the night
of the summer solstice; a seven-day walk conducted in silence; a pacing-off of the shoreline
of high and lucid Loch Etchachan), or Chris Drury, whose work has long been preoccupied
with cairns and waymarkers, or Gary Fabian Cooper, whose recently published Dartmoor
Home details his chronic commitment to re-walking the same local paths and routes –
pilgrimage within perimeter.
Next month sees the premiere in Manchester of Swandown, a film by Andrew Kötting about
a "water pilgrimage" he made with Iain Sinclair, sailing (well, pedalling) a swan-shaped
white pedalo from Hastings on the English Channel to the Olympic site in East London. Part
send-up of the ODA's commitment to "diversity" and "ambition", and part playful
picaresque, the film records the journey and its meetings. Often funny, sometimes poignant,
and well aware of its own absurdities, the film shares its charms with early physical comedy
cinema: Buster Keaton at sea, perhaps. In method at least, Swandownrecalls another of
Sinclair's famous ritual journeys, his walk along (around) the M25: a 117-mile stalk of the
city's greybelt, which attempted both to "exorcise the unthinking malignancy" of Blairism
and "to celebrate the sprawl of London".
As Sinclair and Kötting well know, the pilgrim always treads the brink of self-parody, and is
often closely followed by heritage and by hokum. Pilgrimage has gone cult – it has also gone
kitsch. TC Boyle's pin-sharp parody of American nature writing, The Tortilla Curtain (1995),
features a Californian essayist called Delaney Mossbacher, "a liberal humanist with an
unblemished driving record", whose personalised registration-plate reads PILGRIM and
who styles himself in his writing as "a seer, a worshipper at the shrine" of Mother Earth,
stepping forth with "manzanita stick in hand and nylon pack clinging to my shoulders like a
furled set of wings". Yes, pilgrimage is still a word that can labour under its burdens of
piety. And yet it also feels like a necessary term for describing how more and more people
are choosing to make sense of their places and of themselves.
Five years ago, I began a series of journeys along the old ways of the British landscape: its
holloways, field-paths, Neolithic tracks, sea-roads, coffin-routes, drove-roads and pilgrim-
paths. "Knowing how way leads on to way …" wrote Robert Frost in what is surely the best-
known path-following poem of them all, "The Road Less Travelled". I set out walking on the
chalk of Cambridgeshire, and ended up on the dolerite and gneiss bird-islands of the Outer
Hebrides, the granite of the Cairngorms, the limestone of the West Bank – where a small
group of Palestinians walks ancient wadi paths as protest against Israeli land control – and
the moraines of Minya Konka, a sacred Tibetan peak of dazzling elegance and altitude. The
Icknield Way, which runs within a few miles of my home, was my entry to a network of old
routes criss-crossing Britain and its waters, and connecting them to continents beyond.
Along the way – along the ways – I walked a tidal path nicknamed the Doomway, I walked
stride for stride with a 5,000-year-old man near Liverpool, I traversed a stretch of the
winter Ridgeway on cross-country skis with the only Marxist tax lawyer in London, possibly
the world, I had a number of experiences that I still find hard to explain away rationally, and
I developed some very large blisters indeed.
Everywhere I went on these journeys, I encountered men and women for whom landscape
and walking were vital to life. I met tramps, trespassers, dawdlers, mourners, stravaigers,
explorers, cartographers, poets, sculptors, activists, botanists, and pilgrims of many kinds. I
discovered that walking is still profoundly and widely alive in the world as a more-than-
functional act. I met people who walked in search of beauty, in pursuit of grace or in flight
from unhappiness, who followed songlines or ley-lines; I witnessed walking as non-
compliance, walking as fierce star-song, walking as elegy or therapy, walking as
reconnection or remembrance, and walking to sharpen the self or to forget it entirely.
It seemed that every month I met or heard tell of someone else setting out on a walk "in
search of something intangible", as Rebecca Solnit defines pilgrimage in her great history of
walking, Wanderlust. A young woman, fallen under the spell of George Borrow, had tramped
across England and Wales to St David's in Pembrokeshire, following only footpaths and
green ways. Three folk singers called Ed, Will and Ginger had sold their possessions, left
their homes and taken to the paths of England, sleeping in woods and earning their food by
singing folk songs as they went. Someone was wandering the boundaries of
Northamptonshire – ancestral home of Britain's boot and shoe industry – sleeping in barns
and church porches along the way. One day I walked 25 miles with a young man called
Bram Thomas Arnold who, following the death of his father, had set out from London to
walk to St Gallen in Switzerland, where he had lived as a child. He carried his father's ashes
with him, slept in a small tent by the sides of alfalfa prairies in northern France, made camp
after dark and struck camp before first light to avoid farmers and police, and got as far as
the Black Forest, where he caught a train the rest of the way.
Like many English walkers before me, I ended up in Spain. In Madrid I met an artist, Miguel
Angel Blanco, who might have stepped from the pages of The Shadow of the Wind or
Borges's Labyrinths, and who has devoted his life to the creation of an astonishing library –
the Biblioteca del Bosque (Library of the Forest). His library comprises more than a
thousand wooden "book-boxes", each of which is a reliquary or cabinet containing the
objects and substances (snakeskin, quartz crystals, resin, elm leaf) gathered along the
course of a particular walk. Each of these micro-terrains represents a completed journey;
but the library itself – ever growing – is a compound pilgrimage without visible end. With
Miguel as my guide, I followed a branch-line of the Camino de Santiago from Cercedilla,
north of Madrid, up through the pine forests of the Guadarrama mountains, then down to
the medieval city of Segovia and on out on to the scorched yellow tablelands that stretch
towards Galicia and the cathedral of St James.
In the mountains of eastern Tibet, walking long miles through oak forests to reach Minya
Konka, I set my pace to a Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: La ruta nos
aportó otro paso natural – "The path provides the natural next step". Its form cleverly
acknowledges the transformative consequences of the pilgrimage, which turns the mind
back upon itself, leaving the traveller both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirected.
In the Outer Hebrides, I walked from the west coast of Lewis to the south-east coast of
Harris, sleeping in beehive shielings and passing under an eagle-filled sky, and met a
sculptor called Steve Dilworth for whom the Harris interior – lochan, scarp, erratic boulders
– had become a consecrated terrain, as mysterious and powerful in its presence as Avebury
or Silbury Hill. With a Lewisian poet, sailor and storyteller named Ian Stephen, I took by
boat to the North Atlantic sea-roads – the routes of long usage that exist at sea, determined
by current, prevailing wind and coastline, along which people (raiders, traders, craftsmen,
pilgrims) and their ideas (technologies, languages, stories) have travelled since prehistory.
One week we sailed due north for 40 miles from the most northerly tip of Lewis, in an old
open boat called Jubilee, to the little gannet-island of Sula Sgeir. When we reached the island
we circled it by oar and by sail, and as we did so we noted off its features – Geodha a Bhuin
Mhoir, Palla an Iar, Sroin na Lic – for such is the attention paid by the Gaelic language to its
landscapes that even that sharp scrap of uninhabited rock, far out into the North Atlantic,
has more than 30 place-names attached to it.
Not long before I went to Spain, I read an essay in the journal Artesian by a Czech writer
called Vaclav Cilek, cryptically entitled "Bees of the Invisible". Cilek – himself a long-
distance wanderer – proposed a series of what he called "pilgrim rules", of which the two
most memorable were the "Rule of Resonance" ("A smaller place with which we resonate is
more important than a place of great pilgrimage") and the "Rule of Correspondence" ("A
place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.") "The number of quiet
pilgrims is rising," he observed. "Places are starting to move. On stones and in forests one
comes across small offerings – a posy made from wheat, a feather in a bunch of heather, a
circle from snail shells." I had come across such DIY land-art often myself: the signs of
unnumbered "quiet pilgrimages", of uncounted people improvising odd journeys in the
hope that their voyages out might become voyages in.
Perhaps, though, each era imagines itself to be increasingly on pilgrimage. As Merlin
Coverley notes in The Art of Wandering, the pilgrim is among the most venerable figures of
literature. The true boom-years of religious pilgrimage were, of course, medieval – but the
Victorian decades saw a strong surge of interest in pilgrimage both as practice and
metaphor. Hilaire Belloc's bestsellers The Path to Rome (1902) and The Old Road (1904) –
the former an account of what he called his "mirific and horripilant adventure" of walking to
the Holy Sepulchre – carried that interest over into the 20th century. "Pilgrimage," wrote
Belloc permissively and encouragingly, "ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in
which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or
compose our songs."
Why the contemporary passion for pilgrimage? It clearly speaks at some level to the late-
modern experience of displacement, and to the retreat of dwelling as a feasible mode of
living. "Any man may be called a pilgrim," wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1874, "who
leaveth the place of his birth": by that definition we are almost all pilgrims now. It
represents a return of imperfectly deleted religion. And it is surely part of a broader desire
to reconnect with landscape and nature, provoked by the increasing dematerialisation and
disembodiment of virtualised existence. While we find it easy to say what we make of
places, we are far less good at saying what places make of us – and as Rowan Williams puts
it: "Place works on the pilgrim … that's what pilgrimage is for."
On pilgrimage, knowledge is not acquired unit by unit. Pilgrimage should not be imagined as
a kind of epistemological orienteering, in which one's insights or discoveries are validated
at punch-points along the route. No, knowledge is ideally – in Tim Ingold's fine phrase –
"grown along the way": an ongoing function of passage through place, both site-specific and
motion-sensitive. Because prepositions matter, we might say that while on pilgrimage
people think with landscape, rather than only about it. Or, to borrow one of Belloc's
absolutisms – this from a 1904 essay called "The Idea of Pilgrimage" – "The volume and
depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience."
Perhaps some version of this idea is why so many people seem to need the ritual walk now
more than ever. In a context of the drastic privatisation of most aspects of culture, walking
can offer freedoms that still escape capital's structures of credit and debt, service and
obligation. The gifts offered by walking are, at their best, radical because unreciprocal.
"They give me joy as I proceed," wrote John Clare simply, of field paths. Me too.
Clare was one of the best annotators of natural gift, and his poetic inheritors in this country
would include Thomas A Clark, Peter Larkin, Pauline Stainer and the late RF Langley, all of
whom have written uncomplacently about walking, nature, vision and – though the word
remains culturally contraband – "spirituality". As such, they all stand in a tradition begun by
the other great medieval work of pilgrim-literature, William Langland's Piers Plowman.
Langland's poem opens with its pilgrim-narrator dressed in sheepskin, recalling his
peregrinations: "I …wandered abroad in this world, listening out for its strange and
wonderful events … one May morning, on Malvern Hills, out of the unknown, a marvellous
thing happened to me." The idea that, despite its asperities, pilgrimage might serve as a kind
of wonder-voyage, moving the pilgrim out of the verifiable and into the "marvellous', is one
of its most durable attractions – and why it will surely long continue to appeal.