“I’d like to follow the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela”, Judith said. This was 1988, and we were brightening up the winter months by planning our summer holiday. Being honest, I hadn’t heard of Santiago or its pilgrimage. I’d not studied much medieval history, and there weren’t many people walking it in the late 1980s. But I agreed to investigate it.
We did the trip, by car in 1988, and now we are going to walk it.
Objectively, there are a number of reasons not to remember that trip with affection. Compared with France, the food wasn’t very good, and made me ill on one occasion. I was seasick crossing the Bay of Biscay on the way home. Once when we hadn’t booked a hotel, we thought we were going to have to spend the night in the car, before finding somewhere late on. And after a long and hot day’s driving, we bashed the car in a car park in Salamanca.
In spite of these problems, my gut feeling for many years was that the Santiago trip was the best holiday we had ever had. There was a sense of purpose to our explorations, of continuity behind our discoveries, a feeling of being part of a wider community, living and historical, who made the journey to Santiago. As motorists, we didn’t try to pretend that we were true pilgrims. But we did revel in the history of the Camino, and the rituals that went with it – we look for statues and pictures of St James, like the one below, wherever we go. And we never lost the idea that we might walk it ourselves one day.
That’s the project for the autumn of 2019. Plenty of things will be different. Most obviously, we will be walking, so the journey will take a few weeks rather than a few days. The number of pilgrims has grown enormously: in 1988, [3,500] received their official “compostelas” to recognise that they had walked at least 100km of the Way, whereas in 2018 there were 325,000. Linked to this – and it will be interesting to explore whether this is entirely effect or partly cause – the facilities along the route are much better. Less obviously, Spain will be much changed, politically and economically: our earlier trip was 13 years after the death of Franco, and only two years after Spain joined the EU. Other things will be the same. The route is unchanged from the 12th century. Many of the buildings are also medieval. And most important, Judith and I are doing it together, certainly older, and maybe we’ll find out whether we are wiser or not!
I plan to blog about the walk for a number of reasons. We’ve both got multiple reasons for doing the walk. I’ll write about mine in more detail separately, but there is interest in the history, the insight into modern Spain, the physical challenge, and the mental challenge. More generally, I want to delve deeper into the idea of going on a journey: the theme I explored a bit in my book on the London to Holyhead road, This Ancient Road. What do different journeys have in common? Why do people embark on them, and why are they so often changed by them? Does that depend on the journey you make?
So I’ll be blogging about these themes before we set off, as well as some of the walks we are doing to get into the routine of carrying more kit and walking day after day. I hope this will form an interesting set of reflections, and I’ll be delighted to receive comments, tips, and observations.