Where would you go?
I’d like to walk England’s classic Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester to Canterbury. But it is a two-week commitment and that is partly why I keep putting it off. It seems like too big a first step! Hilaire Belloc wrote about pilgrimage in The Old Road and said that “the Road the greatest and the most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race”. That makes me think of the Ridgeway – the other pilgrimage I want to do – which takes in Avebury, a Neolithic bar row and the Uffington White Horse. It’s also a bit shorter, so I think this is the one I will do first.
Would you make any special stops?
On the Pilgrim’s Way I would take in two stops which are familiar to me. First, the art nouveau Watts Cemetery Chapel in Compton, Surrey, which is a beautiful and sur prising pearl in the Surrey Hills. And a small detour to the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Chaldon, with its red-hued, gruesome “doom mural”. Although this is a reasonably known mural, I found it completely by accident while walking one day, so it was a happy sur prise – the sort that I imagine a pilgrimage to be full of. The depictions of the seven sins are as judgmental and unpleasant as possible. For instance, the man guilty of avarice has coins pouring out of his mouth with his legs astride a fierce fire. It makes me wonder who thought this up and what effect it had on the people who saw this every Sunday. Otherwise, I would like to stop for anything beautiful, to fall in love with old barns, flint cottages, spiders’ webs and dewy grass.
