Thirsty, footsore, but uplifted.

We had these things in common, at least, with the medieval pilgrims to St Albans when some of us walked 12 miles of the way there last month.

St Albans Day is 22 June and on the nearest Saturday each year, there is a festival to remember him, with special church services in the morning and late afternoon.  Groups from my wife’s church, St Mary’s Stoke Newington in North London, have attended in recent years, and although not a worshipper myself, I’ve tagged along for both the walk and the service.

The medieval pilgrims would probably have travelled along what’s now the A5 to get there from the north, or the current A5183 from Radlett or A1081 via London Colney from the south.  More memorable than the road numbers is the fact that the Radlett road and the A5 to the north are the old Roman road we know as Watling Street.  My book on the subject, “This Ancient Road”, comes out on 21 September, and enthusiasts can read a different take on it in John Higgs’s “Watling Street” which came out in mid-July.

We chose not to walk along Watling Street nonetheless – it’s a busy road, though that didn’t put off David, who has blogged about his recent walk at http://a5walk.blogspot.co.uk/2017/.  Our route took us cross-country from Bayford station via Hatfield and along a disused railway line named the Alban Way.  It was a very hot day, and we had to walk fast to get there in time, but regular worshipper or not, there was a real sense of occasion in celebrating the life of St Alban in a packed Abbey Church, and filing out past the shrine to the Saint himself, singing a special hymn to the tune of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah”.  And then sitting down to steak frites and a couple of beers!

Many thanks, by the way, to the church at Little Berkhamsted, which provides much needed facilities for travellers by having their toilet open from early in the morning.  Very helpful.

Deservingly or otherwise, we followed medieval pilgrims in wearing a badge showing the martyrdom of St Alban.   This is a badge from around 1400 in the St Albans museum, and with their permission, I am using it in my book.  By luck, printing it out fitted some ordinary office badge holders neatly, so we put them on.  Our ancestors may have questioned whether we had done enough to deserve a badge (which they would have paid for, not been awarded), but I hope they would be pleased that the tradition remained very much alive six centuries on.

We are used to seeing all sorts of things commemorating the dead on the Western Front in the First World War: the poppies, the centenaries, the memorials erected on the village green, the poetry.  So it came as a bit of a surprise, on a holiday in Slovenia, to find evidence of the effects of war in a very different part of Europe.

Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914.  The area around Kranjska Gora, in western Slovenia, was strategically important for the war against Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian authorities ordered the building of a better road over the Vrsic pass, which rises to 1611m (about 5,900 feet), using Russian prisoners of war as labour.  The road was built in 1915, but disaster struck soon after.    A terrible avalanche in March 1916 killed around 100 Russian prisoners, who were by then being used to clear snow off the road, as well as destroying some of the equipment used to build the road.  As a result, avalanche protection was improved, and the road construction strengthened.

You can still see some of the results of this labour: some of the cobble stones on the many hairpin bends on the road from Kranjska Gora to Vrsic, are originals from the rebuilding during World War I.  There is a small wooden chapel, built in the Russian style, to commemorate the men who lost their lives in the avalanche.  But maybe the more lasting memorial is those cobble stones that their successors put down, which are still benefiting travellers today.