<em>On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain</em> by Oliver Smith
<a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-this-holy-island-9781399409032/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Bloomsbury Continuum, £20, 256 pages</mark></a><br><br>A book about pilgrimage should make me a pushover as a reader. I love reading about pilgrimage, especially when imprisoned in the <em>Catholic Herald</em> basement office, forced to realise my pilgrimage dreams vicariously through books such <em>On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, </em>in which Oliver Smith retraces old pilgrimage routes and visits sacred sites all over the UK.
Unfortunately, we did not get off to a good start. Admittedly, the problem wasn’t really Smith’s fault. It started with the publisher’s note accompanying the book that arrived at my dungeon. “He is not committed to any religion,” stated the last line of an otherwise decent summary about the book and its author. Why mention that? I don’t care if he is or he isn’t—well, I do care now that you have told me and made a point of it. For one, it’s symptomatic of the bland, non-committal, everything-goes shallowness of the modern landscape. Secondly, what does it mean? Does the author believe in God or not? It doesn’t inspire confidence. We don’t read cookbooks put together by people who don’t know how to cook.
Fortunately for Smith, I put the publisher’s note aside to focus on engaging with the book, thinking no more of that “not committed” declaration…It’s obvious that Smith isn’t committed to any religion as you read the book. It shows, especially with the chapter about his pilgrimage to the “most remote pub in mainland Britain”, which he arrives at to find it shut.
While my Friday afternoon margarita contains more spiritual depth than in that particular account, Smith often gets it right when it comes to parsing the underlining reasons for pilgrimage: the need throughout human history for these special physical places to help us escape the “lonely claustrophobia of the human mind” (tell me about it in that basement office!). <br><br>In the much better chapter on the Scottish island of Iona and its reclusive monks, Smith contemplates what drew Saint Columba to such a remote location and whether “it was because he wanted to immerse himself in a life of <em>peregrino</em> – the spirit of sacred, directionless wandering embodied by those early Irish saints.” He writes how “to make a journey into the unknown was to step beyond the self and propel the soul forward”. That’s more like it – you can almost sense the religious commitment trying to break out – and what you hope for from a book on pilgrimage.
The book certainly demonstrates that Smith is a travel writer and a good one. He’s got a nice eye for detail, paints vivid pictures with his words and the sentences flow along like a smooth train ride. He certainty puts in the hours and grafts. Crisscrossing the UK, including some of its islands, he covers the more obvious pilgrimage and holy sites like Stonehenge, the route to Canterbury Cathedral and the <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/on-pilgrimage-with-author-and-photographer-laura-dodsworth/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Ridgeway</mark></a>. Other sites and trails were satisfyingly new to me, which is part of pilgrimage – the joy of discovery. Smith ends up clambering into remote sea caves to sleep in Neolithic tombs, scales holy mountains and also parses how football stadiums and music festivals have become contemporary places of pilgrimage.
Are they though? Reading the chapter about how the Liverpool football stadium of Anfield has become an annual pilgrimage site following the terrible Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989, I sympathised with it being bestowed such status for those affected. But I’m not convinced it is a pilgrimage site, as it can’t function as such for the majority of people. Anfield just isn’t a <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/pilgrimage-standoff-assisi-or-santiago-de-compostela-its-a-tough-call/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Santiago de Compostela or Assisi</mark></a> or Fatima, which are open to all. As the book goes on, you sense the editors and others involved in bringing it to press also "aren't committed to any religion".
Like any good travel writer, Smith does a good job of seeking individuals who “pressed the ejector seat on a sensible life to obey the dip and turn of the open road” and hearing them out. A rich panoply of life's bucaneers ranges from rugged fishermen to New Age hippy types to neo-pagans. They usually have interesting things to say about the “thin places” that most of us are unaware of: those sites Smith visits “where the membrane between the mundane and metaphysical was thin”. Or about how walking might turn a “body into a prayer”, or about the current state of society and how “our lack of a sense of history has got us into the trouble that we are now in”.
But at the same time, throughout the book I couldn’t help wondering when he might just talk to a priest. Eventually, in the chapter on Walsingham, "England's Nazareth", he does it on page 174.<br><br>“Most of our pilgrims come from urban centres,” says Fr Kevin Smith, the priest administrator of the Anglican shrine (I can't recall one Catholic priest featuring in the book). “To come into this beautiful part of the world is a wonderful thing for people who don’t have that space, that beauty to enjoy. It speaks to people about the goodness of God, and the gift of life.” A simple analysis of pilgrimage and God’s role in it from a spiritual expert (aka a priest). The book could have done with more of that.
<em>The Spectator’s</em> favourable review of the book commented: “I wonder if something’s lost when pilgrimage is stripped of any religious content beyond a vague sense of the numinous.” Yes! Of course something is lost, dearest <em>Speccy</em> (I am starting to better understand why <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/interview-george-farmer-on-his-catholic-faith-and-being-married-to-a-us-media-star/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">George Farmer</mark></a> changed his <em>Spectator</em> subscription for a <em>Catholic Herald</em> one).
And just as something is lost in the book, you realise how a much larger “something else” has been lost across the whole of the UK. Smith, whether intentionally or not, depressingly confirms what an unholy island we inhabit as he describes pilgrimage trails vying with (and losing out to) motorways like the M4 and B roads, with the modern pilgrim abandoned by shuttered churches and pubs that once catered to thirsty and hungry questing souls.
If you want to know more about the holy sites and pilgrimage routes connected to those churches and pubs from when the UK was a more religiously curious and open land, this book delivers and is worth reading (though I would definitely wait for the paperback copy: it will cost less and, more importantly, weigh less in your rucksack if you do an old-fashioned walking pilgrimage and “commit”). This is an interesting travel book; I'm just not convinced it is a stirring book about pilgrimage and the soul’s eternal quest. But it will get you started and thinking a bit more deeply about pilgrimage and those "thin places", and perhaps that is enough. <br><em><br>Photo: : A woman turns her face towards the sun during the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, England, 21 June 2023. (Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images.)</em>
