This is part of Travel Firsts, a series featuring trips that required a leap of faith or marked a major life milestone.
A modern pilgrimage through Herefordshire’s Golden Valley
19.04.2024 - 12:01 / theguardian.com
I’m lying on my back. Directly above me is “a vault of heaven” with great wooden beams. I’ve never woken before under such a high ceiling – but then I’ve never gone to sleep in a church before.
We have arranged pew cushions on the stone slabs for increased comfort and, while this may sound austere, my fellow pilgrims and I agree we have slept remarkably well – helped by pies and cider from the Bridge Innnearby. Just as in Chaucer’s time, there’s no point doing a pilgrimage if you can’t eat heartily and swap stories with your fellow travellers, accompanied at the inn by local musicians having an impromptu ceilidh.
St Michael’s Church in Michaelchurch Escley, in rural Herefordshire, is one of the churches that has signed up to the new and innovative night sanctuary scheme arranged by the British Pilgrimage Trust. Pilgrims can sleep there for a nominal £15 each – as rural accommodation can be costly or scarce. The Trust also arranges guided pilgrimages where luggage is transported for you by a “sherpa van” from church to church. All you need do, happily, is carry a day pack. They will even supply a pilgrim’s staff, hand-whittled from fallen wood and with a satisfying heft.
Our pilgrimage guide, Simon Lockett, assembles us in the churchyard where we lean on our staffs – inevitably someone makes a joke about a staff meeting – and talks us through the day’s journey, then leads us in a short prayer from the First Nations of North America about respect for animals.
While this is ostensibly a Christian pilgrimage, in that we travel from church to church and are guided by a vicar, the Pilgrimage Trust is always clear that this is for those who “bring their own beliefs” and is nondenominational. The pilgrimage route visits many pagan sites with spiritual resonance, such as old water sources and Arthur’s Stone. The emphasis is on those making their own personal journeys who might want peace and quiet at times to do so. Guides suggest some stretches of the walk are done in silence.
But that is generally later in the day when everyone has had time to do a bit of chattering. We set off along a wonderful green holloway carved by generations of travelling livestock, down into the Golden Valley – surely the best branding in the country – with its fields of high maize and deep broadleaved forests, where startlingly bright rowan berries are out in profusion.
The group is a mixed one: some from Norfolk, some from the south-east, one from Sweden – which replicates medieval pilgrimages, when people would often travel from overseas. Aneka is amused by the British penchant for stiles, uncommon in her native country.
Having crossed a fair few, we reach an unusual tree formation, where an oak and ash have fused to grow up out
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