...and thus I'll make my pilgrimage.
Jun. 7th, 2005 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustLong-distance footpath number GR65 runs from Le Puy in the centre of France, south and west to the Pyrenees, and over the pass of Roncesvaux into Spain. It recreates the main route taken by pilgrims heading through France to the shrine of St James at Compostela in north-west Spain.
There are people who are attracted by the challenge of a thousand mile walk, just as there are people who want to get married on Everest, or hop backwards to both poles. I am not one of them. I have done the Lyke Wake walk once, and am happy to know that I was once fit enough to do it, but I don't feel the need to do it again, or faster, or at night... I admit that it's a pleasant feeling to trace the GR65 across a map of France, and know that I have covered all that territory on foot; and even that I'm a little sorry not to have made it all the way to the border. But I walk for pleasure, and I holiday for pleasure, and when a combination of blazing sun (around blood temperature, whichever scale you use), bleeding feet and walking on roads rather than paths reduces that pleasure to zero, I'll take a break. It's taken me ten years to get this far...
Then there are the people who - like the medieval pilgrims - feel that making this journey will solve some problem for them. Traditionally this means believing that saints are somehow still connected to the relics they have left behind, and that if you visit those relics, the saint is that much more likely to cure your illness or bless your enterprise. Modern pilgrims are more likely to be hoping that if they take three months away from the complications of their daily life, they will gain some insight, some new approach to solving their problems; I base this assumption not on my own observations but on those of Tim Moore, whose Spanish Steps provoked many of these reflections. But in order to justify this time out, you still need to define the journey as special in some way, carrying some sort of spiritual authenticity.
Not me; I'm just on holiday. I enjoy seeing the country close-up. And I admit that I enjoy the historical associations of the route, the sense that for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, with all their mixed motives and different modes of travel, have travelled along these paths or others nearby. I enjoy, too, the physical evidence of their passage, the pilgrim churches and hostels, the evidence of place names and scallop shells and statues of Saint James (usually depicted dressed as a pilgrim, that is, someone making a pilgrimage to his own shrine, which is only odd if you stop to think about it). And on a hot day, it's pleasant to be welcomed by the shade of an old barn to which the villagers have contributed cast-off furniture to provide an informal shelter, or the water-tap on the corner of a lawn, against which the owner has propped a scallop shell as an invitation to the thirsty.
And I suppose that if I feel welcomed by these things, then at some level I am, after all, including myself among the pilgrims.
There are people who are attracted by the challenge of a thousand mile walk, just as there are people who want to get married on Everest, or hop backwards to both poles. I am not one of them. I have done the Lyke Wake walk once, and am happy to know that I was once fit enough to do it, but I don't feel the need to do it again, or faster, or at night... I admit that it's a pleasant feeling to trace the GR65 across a map of France, and know that I have covered all that territory on foot; and even that I'm a little sorry not to have made it all the way to the border. But I walk for pleasure, and I holiday for pleasure, and when a combination of blazing sun (around blood temperature, whichever scale you use), bleeding feet and walking on roads rather than paths reduces that pleasure to zero, I'll take a break. It's taken me ten years to get this far...
Then there are the people who - like the medieval pilgrims - feel that making this journey will solve some problem for them. Traditionally this means believing that saints are somehow still connected to the relics they have left behind, and that if you visit those relics, the saint is that much more likely to cure your illness or bless your enterprise. Modern pilgrims are more likely to be hoping that if they take three months away from the complications of their daily life, they will gain some insight, some new approach to solving their problems; I base this assumption not on my own observations but on those of Tim Moore, whose Spanish Steps provoked many of these reflections. But in order to justify this time out, you still need to define the journey as special in some way, carrying some sort of spiritual authenticity.
Not me; I'm just on holiday. I enjoy seeing the country close-up. And I admit that I enjoy the historical associations of the route, the sense that for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, with all their mixed motives and different modes of travel, have travelled along these paths or others nearby. I enjoy, too, the physical evidence of their passage, the pilgrim churches and hostels, the evidence of place names and scallop shells and statues of Saint James (usually depicted dressed as a pilgrim, that is, someone making a pilgrimage to his own shrine, which is only odd if you stop to think about it). And on a hot day, it's pleasant to be welcomed by the shade of an old barn to which the villagers have contributed cast-off furniture to provide an informal shelter, or the water-tap on the corner of a lawn, against which the owner has propped a scallop shell as an invitation to the thirsty.
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And I suppose that if I feel welcomed by these things, then at some level I am, after all, including myself among the pilgrims.
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Date: 2005-06-08 08:14 am (UTC)"Spanish Steps" sounds interesting. I look forward to lying on your couch and reading it on my next visit (maybe with a stinking cold, maybe without - I haven't decided yet).
Questions, questions...
Date: 2005-06-08 08:44 am (UTC)I'd like to revisit both of the areas we walked in (and may post about why); but I doubt I'll actually fill in the gaps in my track.
We didn't stay in refugios, so you'll have to look to "Spanish Steps" for an answer to that one (it's a bit Bill Bryson-lite, but I look forward to having you here to make your own judgement!).
As for seeing how the Spanish welcome pilgrims, this is what I have in mind (http://www.atg-oxford.co.uk/trips_1.php?tripcode=jcs), although I'm having trouble reconciling myself to the price!