Every summer solstice, thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to greet the longest day of the year. Judging from the druids in the crowd, you might think this tradition dates back to pagan Britain. In fact, it was started in 1974 by members of a hippy commune who decided to host a free festival among the stones. The Pope, the Dalai Lama and John Lennon were invited, along with a handful of British Airways hostesses.
These ‘interactions between ancient and modern faith’ fascinate the travel writer Oliver Smith. On This Holy Island is a journey across Britain, telling the story of a dozen pilgrim destinations and the spiritual seekers drawn to them. As well as recounting the history of these places, it explores how later generations have re-enchanted them.
Smith’s journey took place in the wake of the pandemic. Originally, he planned to walk the Camino to Santiago. When the opportunity came, lockdowns limited his options for travel. Instead, he decided to visit some of Britain’s holy sites, from the prehistoric to the present, looking for sanctity closer to home.
The journey includes several well-known shrines. Smith spends a night in a tidal shelter on the causeway to Lindisfarne and attempts to float around Iona on a packraft. He also searches for more out-of-the-way spots, climbing into Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, the oldest ceremonial burial ground in Europe, and hiking to the Old Forge on the Knoydart Peninsula, arguably the most remote pub in the country. His journey takes in mountains, lakes, suburban streets and ‘the immense extent of an unravelling sea’, and he writes well about all these settings. He also describes the tacky ephemera that decorate most tourist destinations, including the carparks, campsites and votive offerings of the New Age: ‘Apples, incense, crystals (one with the price tag still on).’
Some of the best chapters capture the peculiarly national flavour of these places. For example, the Norfolk village of Walsingham, known as England’s Nazareth,
looked like the setting for Hovis adverts, Enid Blyton books, Miss Marple mysteries. Its music was the clink of china in a tearoom, the coo of a morning wood pigeon, the clunk of a croquet mallet and the whistle of a steam train on a bank holiday. Its sacraments were scones, Sunday roasts, cask ale. Its via dolorosas were country lanes, potholed and garlanded with cow parsley.
The Walsingham chapter describes how the railways revived pilgrimage to this medieval shrine in the mid-19th century. Another chapter explains how a respectable Victorian major helped turn Glastonbury into a contemporary capital for the esoteric.
Smith works hard to separate the facts from the colourful stories that have obscured them over the years. He also brings a mix of curiosity and scepticism to the modern myths projected on to the patchy record of the past – such as the far-right neopagans who borrowed their mythology from ITV’s Robin of Sherwood before conducting their rituals at the neolithic tomb of Wayland’s Smithy, near Ashbury, in Oxfordshire. But some of the briefer chapters lack such dizzying collisions between the ancient, the modern and the cod historic, which makes them less engaging.
During his journeys, Smith encounters several other pilgrims. These are mostly men and women at ‘weightless’ stages of life, searching for solid ground. Like Smith, they rarely have much explicit faith, but are drawn to places of spiritual promise. One farmer, who built a long barrow on his land for people to bury the urns of lost relatives, offers a theory for why so many non-believers seem attracted to pilgrimage: ‘I’m probably like a lot of people for whom there’s a feeling that the established churches don’t speak for us. But we also don’t want to live in a soulless world.’
If pilgrimage is having a revival, this ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category helps to explain why. Visiting shrines allows people to experience ritual without having to accept any difficult doctrines or unfashionable teaching. But I wonder if something’s lost when pilgrimage is stripped of any religious content beyond a vague sense of the numinous. If there’s no attempt at inner transformation, it simply becomes a lofty word for a walk, or else joins the yoga retreats and meditation apps as a spiritual practice repackaged for the wellness industry.
That said, pilgrimage for Smith is a way of restoring our sense of wonder. In a time of environmental decline, he argues that we need to ‘travel deeper, not further; to break through the crust of the familiar to find the fantastical’. Hiking to a healing well or sacred stone teaches people to see the familiar with fresh appreciation. Post-pandemic, it makes even more sense to look locally before setting off for Rome, Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. On This Holy Island shows us just where to start.
Comments