By the time I reached Lisbon in February this year, with the staccato rap of my walking sticks on the quayside causing the trendy young things watching the sunset to turn heads my way, I felt pretty confident that I had achieved “dirty pilgrim” status.
Behind me and the Portuguese capital lay more than 1,000 miles of an extended Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage trail stretching from the French Pyrenees to the city of Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain’s Galicia region. It was a long way off from my religious upbringing at Ampleforth.
