A week or so on from when we finished the Dales Way, from Ilkley in the Yorkshire Dales to Bowness on Windermere, here are some reflections.

Overall, it’s an enjoyable walk, with some variety of terrain and some good views, albeit not spectacular ones. Quite a lot is along rivers – here is a view of the Wharfe at the start.

It could be a good walk for fairly experienced walkers who want to do a place-to-place walk for the first time.  But this walk is not to be underestimated.  Depending on how many days you do it in – and there are choices here – you can have some long days, and there is definitely some climbing to be done.  It’s just over 80 miles, so across 6 days, which we did, it averages between 13 and 14 miles.  We met others who were doing it over 8 days, and fitter and faster walkers than us doing it over 4.

The signposting is patchy.  In places it’s good, in other places there are signs for public footpath but not Dales Way, and in places not even that.  So you need a guidebook and map.  The Ordnance Survey app was useful on occasions for us.  

The hotels were fine and in some cases better than that.

This year at any rate, with more people holidaying at home, the hotels and pubs were very busy.  So it’s wise to book your dinner at least a day in advance.

There was certainly a sense of achievement in finishing the walk – it’s only a mile or so from the end that you get your first glimpse of Lake Windermere. There are options for extending it: there are now established link walks to Ilkley from Bradford, Leeds, or Harrogate, and clearly possibilities for doing more in the Lake District.

We are walking the Dales Way, starting in Ilkley and heading for Windermere.  So far we have walked up Wharfedale, mostly close to the river itself, with a few miles today up into the hills under and over some limestone crags, and past an enormous lime kiln from the 19^th century where the stone was burnt.

There are a few other glimpses into the economy of previous centuries.  Not far out of Ilkley in the village of Addingham is a settlement named Low Mlll, which was built as a working mill in the late 18^th century, as mechanisation came to the textile industry.  Its fortunes waxed and waned in the 19^th century, and in the 1826, it was subjected to an attack from Luddite hand textile workers from Lancashire who were opposed to the new machines.  The mills survived this and other problems and remained  important until after World War 1.  

These days, the mill has been converted into apartments, and the workers’ cottages are attractive residences, many with very smart cars outside.  Employment is much more weighted towards the hospitality sector, but a constant refrain from the hoteliers and café owners we’ve spoken to is that they can’t get staff.  This part of Yorkshire is very busy this summer, for obvious reasons, and that’s reflected in the difficulty in finding a pub for dinner, as well as hotel booking.  And it’s often not so much physical constraints in terms of numbers of tables or whatever as the people needed to cook and serve the meal.  

We happened to catch the local news on Tuesday, reporting that unemployment had actually risen in Yorkshire and Humberside in the three months to June.  Somehow that’s not helping the Wharfedale hospitality industry.  The labour market has adjusted to changes in the economy down the centuries: it looks like another change is coming, if current trends persist.

There is a moment on pilgrimages called the Mont Joie in French, Monte de Gozo in Spanish.  It’s the point when the pilgrim gets their first sight of the building they have come to worship in – on the Camino de Santiago, it’s about five miles from the end and you get a fine view over the city with the towers of the cathedral at its heart.

I had a more modest Mont Joie moment this afternoon, when the spire of Salisbury Cathedral suddenly emerged ahead of us, as we came down from woods outside the city.  We were nearing the end of a two day walk from Winchester Cathedral, following the Clarendon Way, which runs for about 26 miles between the two, crossing  the River Test and the Hampshire-Wiltshire boundary in the process. 

As with the Santiago trip, I had a number of motives for this walk.  Exercise was one: it’s a good workout over undulating ground, without feeling like a test to get into the army.  Covid-19 put paid to our plans to walk the Ridgeway in the spring, so it was nice to do at least a couple of days instead.  We were also able to spend our first night in a hotel for five months, at the White Hart in Stockbridge, a bit off the route but very comfortable.

There’s always interest in seeing a different part of the country.  We’ve been to both Winchester and Salisbury several times, but not seen the area in between.  It looks a pretty affluent part of the world on the whole – not to say that there won’t be pockets of poverty, but plenty of very nice properties, thatched rooves, roses round the door, lovely.  Stockbridge itself has some nice shops: we patronised the Thyme and Tides deli for lunch – smoked trout pate, a local specialty with one guidebook saying that this stretch of the River Test had the best trout fishing in southern England.  When we looked down onto the Test from a bridge later in the morning, it was very clear, but not a fish in sight, big or small, though there was a heron in the distance.

The two cathedral cities are clearly rich in history, and we will come back another time to explore them properly.  The route between the two was a Roman road, and the Clarendon Way follows that for quite a bit of the time, though it’s hard to discern now exactly where the soldiers would have marched.  The route does pass through ancient woodlands, and the remains of Clarendon Palace, a favourite royal hunting lodge from the medieval period, which gives the Way its name.  And as usual, there are some surprises and things you spot for yourself: the decoration round the west door at Broughton Church, for instance, dates back to the early 13th century, not world-leading craftsmanship but evocative of its era.

Out in the open air, you can forget the virus still dominating so much of national life, but in the towns and villages it’s never far away.  Winchester and Salisbury were both pretty busy actually; not so Waterloo or the tube journey to get there.  Local pubs were well geared up for social distancing, and at least most were open.

The main attraction for me, however, came at the end.  From my first visit as a teenager, Salisbury Cathedral has been one of my favourite buildings in the world, and of course I’m far from alone.  There’s the physical beauty, in the colour of the stone, the proportions, the decoration, and of course the scale and profile of the spire.  The setting is wonderful too: the epitome of an English cathedral close, peaceful but open to the public to enjoy, and with some modern sculpture so that it’s not frozen in a previous century.  I also find the building inspiring: without sharing the faith that drove the builders, I can admire their ambition and achievement.  Worth a long walk, and sent me off with renewed energy which lasts beyond the journey home.

VE Day, and as with all these anniversaries from the World Wars, I feel ambivalent.

It’s right to honour the dedication of the people who fought in the wars.  They included my Dad.  He wasn’t celebrating VE Day because he was still fighting in the Far East.  When he did get home, in 1946, he was proud of his war service, and later became an enthusiastic member of the Dunkirk Veterans Association.

But he didn’t glorify war, or pretend that it had somehow been a good thing.  Among other interruptions to his life, it meant that he didn’t finish his qualifications in Insurance until 1952 – when we moaned about the length of our studies, he pointed out that he was 35 when he took his last exam.  More generally, he used to tell us that nobody won a war.  He didn’t come away hating the Germans or the Japanese.      He started out by looking for the good in everybody rather than the bad.

So I’m wary about glorifying war.  And I wish I thought we had really learnt the lessons, both as a country and as part of the western alliance.  The world is a more peaceful place now than for much of the last century.  But far too many wars go on, with the inevitable attendant suffering, and our attitude is inconsistent.  Britain persists in pouring resources into an independent nuclear deterrent, for purposes that elude me apart from a hangover of national pride.  We took a willing part in the disastrous attack on Iraq in 2003.  And while we have made some efforts to strengthen international cooperation, war and suffering took place on a large scale in the former Yugoslavia in the1990s before the international community finally intervened.  The same is happening in Syria and parts of Africa today.

I’m also wary about drawing too many parallels between the war and the sacrifices arising from coronavirus, about national endeavour, togetherness, “Dunkirk spirit”, and all the rest of it.  Wartime sacrifices were forced on us by the need to repel the Nazis before they changed our way of life possibly forever.   To combat this evil, tens of thousands of civilians died, and the whole country suffered privations.  The need to rebuild the economy meant that food rationing extended until 1954, so longer in peacetime than in wartime.  By contrast, we have at least some choices as to how we respond to coronavirus.

So as we emerge from the coronavirus crisis, I’d rather focus on creating a better 2020s than a modernised 1940s.  The Attlee government made huge changes for the better in creating the NHS and the rest of the welfare state.  But they also traded heavily on the nation’s willingness to put up with the continuation of wartime privations, and were slow in modernising the economy.  Churchill, rightly idolised as a wartime leader, was much less successful in his 1950s peacetime government, again slow to modernise the economy, and clinging on to past glories in foreign policy in a way which came crashing down at Suez.  In the 1940s, most of the parents and grandparents of the BAME people staffing so much of the NHS and care sector today were living in what we still called the Empire.   So let’s forge our own way forward, rather than try to recreate even the good bits of the past.

I’ve been reflecting for some time about why there is growing interest in the two World Wars – I don’t remember these anniversaries being such a big thing in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe because those who fought the wars were busy with family and working life at the time.  I wonder whether it’s because the sacrifice of the wartime generations makes those of us who haven’t faced that feel small by comparison.  That’s understandable – and their sacrifice should be respected – but we don’t lack challenges of our own: climate change, gross inequalities at home and worldwide, child poverty, homelessness, and continuing war in some parts of the world to name a few.  There is a contrast, in that the fight against wartime enemies was a clear and uniting national goal, whereas today’s challenges are more amorphous.  But we can actually all play a part in tackling these, through our own behaviour, through volunteering, through campaigning and activism, and (for some) donating money.  Whatever cause each of us finds closest to our own heart, we can do something to advance it.

If the combination of VE Day and coronavirus leads to more enthusiasm for today’s causes, I shall be delighted, and will eat my words well ahead of the 80^th anniversary.  If not, I’ll keep making these points.

It’s now over four weeks since we got home, and five since we walked into the main square in Santiago and sat on the pavement with other pilgrims, gazing at the cathedral and contemplating the journey we had completed.  Here are some final reflections, with the benefit of a bit of perspective, but before the memories fade too much.

It was a great experience.  There’s lots to love about it.  You get masses of fresh air and exercise.  The landscape is beautiful at least some of the time, and mostly at least easy on the eye.  Food and drink are easy to come by, and remarkably affordable.  And you are part of an ever changing community of people from different nations, with different reasons for being there, all united in their desire to walk on, and with an outlook that’s mutually supportive rather than competitive. 

We were mostly lucky with the weather: like anything, it was much less fun on the days it rained, so too many of those, especially back to back, would make it harder, and a heatwave would have given me even bigger problems.  We were also lucky in that neither of us was ill or injured.  Blisters or sore feet are one thing – every shop, big or small, seems to sell Compeed, and there are vending machines for that and other chemists’ products, which I haven’t seen in the UK – but more serious problems would be tough to manage.

Finding accommodation was harder than we thought.  We were there at a very busy time.  So rather than risk not finding anywhere to stay, we started booking ahead, which worked for us, though we had intended to stay more flexible.  Others didn’t make any bookings, and mostly seemed to do all right, though you can’t always be too choosy.  We found some very good B&Bs that were very economical, and the hostels (albergues) we stayed in were mostly fine, though I come back to the point that if everyone arrived soaked, they would be much less fun.

But there’s more to a six week walk than just the practical side.  I felt quite emotional, from the time we stood on the Monte de Gozo a few miles from Santiago, and saw the towers of the cathedral for the first time.  There was then a strange interval as we walked through the outskirts of what is quite a big city, before we got to the medieval centre and finally rounded the last corner into the Praza do Obradoiro, with the west front of the cathedral on our left.  I was delighted to finish, looking forward to visiting the relics of St James, and attending pilgrim mass, as pilgrims had done for centuries, and also, frankly, to having a few days holiday when we could do something other than walk!  I was proud that we had completed the journey, walking every step of the nearly 500 miles from the Pyrenees with all our gear on our backs, and that a combination of plenty of planning and a fair amount of luck meant that we had done it in pretty good order.  I was relieved that nothing had gone wrong.  Some people report feeling sad: I recognise that, but didn’t feel that myself, since while I love walking, doing that for several weeks was not an end in itself, but part of a journey. 

Beyond all this, I was moved because I felt in Santiago that I had become part of something bigger than myself, a community of people spanning the centuries, who had walked a considerable distance in the footsteps of the medieval pioneers, and had made it.  I hadn’t intended actually to sit on the pavement to take it all in, but having got to the square, felt strongly that that was what I wanted to do, and not just because the weather was perfect.  The towers rise above you, and I felt at one and the same time rather small but a genuine part of the Santiago community.

I’m very glad to have gone, grateful to have the support of family and colleagues to be able to take six weeks out for this expedition, and glad that nothing went wrong.  But I was also glad to get back home.  The Camino is in many ways a world of its own, a curious mix of being in a bubble of a daily routine, while walking through cities, towns and villages where other people are going about their everyday lives.  Since I’m fortunate enough to enjoy my own everyday life, work and otherwise, it was good to get back to it after six weeks away.  I’m looking forward to doing more walks from place to place, for less time and with less kit, but unlike some people, I don’t plan to do another Camino.

Has it changed me?  Maybe that’s for others to say.  I said in the blogpost on 18 August, before we left, that I wasn’t seeking anything in particular, but was looking forward to the chance to think.  And I have come back with some clearer ideas about what to do in life, and also about how not to get so mad about minor annoyances: I need to hold myself to account on both those fronts.

Finally, a reflection on the Camino itself.  It’s worlds away from the Camino of 1988 which we followed by car.  I’ve written already about the explosion in the number of people walking, and there has been a proliferation of routes as different Caminos are researched and established.  Although I didn’t do the walk for religious reasons, I do worry that the route is losing its connection with St James, which in the end is what holds it together.  More and more people are finishing their walk not in Santiago but on the coast in Finisterre: I admire their energy, and understand the satisfaction of walking right to the “end of the earth”, but it’s not the goal of this walk.  Some of the traditional routes through the suburbs into the big cities are generating alternatives, maybe along a river, so that the route is prettier and today’s walkers can avoid unappealing housing or industrial estates.  Understandable, again, but the point of this journey is that we are following a medieval route, whether or not it is an area of outstanding natural beauty.  There are more and more companies organising the trip for you, taking your rucksack or indeed suitcase from place to place, and sometimes providing sustenance en route.  And more and more people are doing the route over two or more years, sometimes only a week at a time.

I’m getting to sound like a Camino purist or bore.  The only official definition of completing the Camino is that you have to walk 100km or cycle 200km to get your certificate known as a compostela.  Beyond that, different people will have their own versions of how you should do the walk.  Some people walk a lot further than us: if you start in the historic pilgrim town of Le Puy in central France, for example, you do twice as much.  Others reckon that if you stay in hotels rather than the hostels, you aren’t really following the spirit of the thing.  I tried to follow the advice in our guide book not to feel superior to people who started just in time to do the minimum 100km, on the basis that we all have our own reasons for doing the Camino.  But I keep coming back to the fact that what’s distinctive about this route is that it’s the way of St James, and the more you depart from that, the more it risks becoming one long distance footpath among others.

We shall certainly be maintaining our gentle obsession with the saint, looking out his statue in the line up of apostles everywhere we visit, looking for the signs in other countries, and boring everyone with these quests.  And we do so hugely grateful to have had the opportunity to walk the Camino de Santiago in 2019.

One of many many signs …

Albergues: hundreds of them, ready to put pilgrims up for the night, at times competing for business, at times all seem to be full.  Vary from austere and basic to those with swimming pools.

Bikes:  Most pilgrims are on foot, but there were enough bikes to have to be on the alert.  Some are quite considerate, moving at a moderate pace and ringing the bell well in advance.  Others come hurtling down the hill, shouting something like “passant”.  Walkers who, unlike me, are also cyclists agreed that this co-existence on the path was difficult.

Cafes: again hundreds of them, and we were pleasantly surprised by what we found several times day after day.  We developed a real taste for cafe con leche (hot milk, Caffe Latte in English ho ho), which neither of us drinks much at home.

Dogs: hardly any, in contrast to our usual mountain walks where we normally meet some with their owners even in tricky terrain.  We saw one in a smart red coat walking with his/her owner one day: the dog was moving gamely on, but only had short legs.

Empanadas: lunch fare in Galicia, envelopes of a dough that’s a cross between bread and pastry, with tuna or chicken in the middle.  We remember them tasting better in 1988 to be honest.

Fountains/Fuentes: one of my worries was whether we could carry enough water on hot days to stay hydrated, but it’s much easier now that so many villages have “fuentes”, drinking fountains, with “aqua potable” in them.

Graffiti: masses of it all over the place.  I normally quite like graffiti, but most of this was neither artistic nor clever.  I got heartily sick of the way some heroes had crossed out “Castile y” in front of “Leon” on signposts, presumably as part of an independence campaign, except where that involved climbing too far up.  And there was also “Jesus didn’t start in Sarria”, a catty reference to the fact that if you walk at least the 100km from the town of Sarria you can get your compostela certificate.  My lay minister wife tells me that we have no information about Jesus and the Camino, but he was very clear that you should “love your neighbour as yourself”.

Horreos: traditional structures in Galicia to dry corn and other crops, and apparently now to store bikes!  You see very old ones built of stone or wood, sometimes crumbling, and also modern ones in the gardens of new and very well-appointed houses, presumably as decoration.

Iglesias, or Igrexas in Gallegan: churches, in each village.  Not always open, but usually in a pretty good state of repair.

(St) James: since it’s the way of St James, it’s not surprising that there are frequent statues of him along the way, usually in traditional pilgrim dress, with broad-brimmed hat, scallop shell, staff, and gourd as water bottle.  Indeed it’s surprising in some churches that there isn’t any reference.

Koreans: singled out with affection and admiration.  We met people from about 25 different countries, and one of the most common outside Western Europe were Koreans.  They were constantly cheerful and friendly, in spite of varying degrees of English or Spanish, when not a single other pilgrim could talk to them in their language.

Lights: streetlights mattered in the early mornings to help find the right way out of town, as we sometimes set out before dawn, occasionally using head torches too.

(Virgin) Mary: even more prevalent than St James in terms of dedication of churches and statues and altars within the churches.

N120: Spanish equivalent of an A road which we criss-crossed many times in the middle section of the Camino

O: prominent letter in Gallegan, meaning “the”, and used more than before, I think.  When we were here in 1988, the important stop of O Cebreiro was often called El Cebreiro, but not now.

Pilgrim menu:  Daily fare in the evenings, in albergues and cafe.  Amazing value for money: for between 10 and 12 euros, you get soup or salad, choice of pork or chicken or sometimes fish with chips or occasionally rice, some kind of dessert – creme caramel, ice cream, occasionally cake – plus wine, water, and coffee.  The food was always edible and often much better than that.  Not their fault that it can become repetitive. 

Quechua: prominent brand of rucksacks and other equipment, sold by Decathlon.

Rivers: of course we crossed many rivers, though only a few big ones, especially early on.  Often there were impressive bridges dating back to medieval times, with several arches and not much water.  

Senda: path created alongside a main road for the walkers.  Very helpful, though often the roads weren’t very busy in practice.

Tortilla:  Spanish omelette, and very popular lunch fare especially early on.  Again, I didn’t think I particularly liked these, but developed a taste for them.  Better hot, and I preferred to have a bit of cheese or ham in, but not essential.  In a posher cafe on the approach to Burgos, they even had one with vegetables in it!

Urban areas: the Camino goes through several towns and cities, and the route is not always pretty.  I actually found it interesting to see some of city life, after days in the countryside, and in any case, the Camino is following a historic route, not starting from scratch.

Vines: an attractive feature, especially obviously in the Rioja region, but at other times too.  Looking forward to drinking the fruits of those vines in years to come.

WCs: in the cafes, much better than I feared.  Only one set of footprints on the whole Camino, and most so clean you could eat your dinner off the floor.  The Spanish have taken to using magic eyes to regulate the light timings, so you sometimes have to wave your arms around.

X: letter much used in the Basque language

Yellow arrows: these mark the way in town and countryside alike.  The waymarking is excellent, and makes for good progress.  We are going to notice the difference when we get back to studying Ordnance maps in the Chilterns, and debating whether this is our left fork, or whether we need to carry straight on, or indeed should have turned left at the last one …

Z:  letter often used in Spanish registrations, though come to think of it, it’s in ours too.

Engaging with the history of the Camino was always one of the appeals of the journey to me.  The rationale for coming this way is that we are walking in the steps of medieval pilgrims – there are plenty of other places to walk in Spain if you want – so I’ve tried to look out for things they would have seen along the way.

This has felt a bit harder than I expected.  Perhaps that’s because when we followed the Camino in the car in 1988, we naturally stopped at places where the medieval heritage was clear, which may have distorted our perspective.  And in several places, that does indeed remain.  The great cathedrals of Burgos and Leon are obvious examples, along with well known sites such as Santa Domingo de la Calzada and San Juan de Ortega.  There are also smaller places which have been closely linked to the pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, where it’s easy to sense that atmosphere: Rabanal is one example, and O Cebreiro, though the considerable growth in modern facilities there means you have to use your imagination a bit more.

In other places, it’s frankly harder.  This is not surprising, given that the heyday of the medieval pilgrimage ended over 750 years ago.  Buildings fall down, and styles change.  Spain used its riches in the 16th and 17th centuries to rebuild and refurbish churches, so sometimes what you think may be a medieval church turns out to be later.  And many have added 18th century altarpieces, which, shall we say, are not my thing.  In some cases, the job of finding out is harder, because the church is simply not open: maybe there are good security reasons for this, but it seems a pity.  But that’s offset by those places where not only is the building open, but a dedicated person is there to welcome you, answer your questions, and also stamp your “credencial” (pilgrim passport).  Those places lift the spirit on a tough day.

There are also a few moments where you see a view that perhaps is what the medieval pilgrim would have seen – here is the approach to San Esteban in Zabaldika, near Pamplona (minus the telegraph poles of course!)

As to the pilgrims themselves, I am in awe of their achievement.  As Judith put it during a rough stretch in the rain, “imagine doing this in sandals with a heavy woollen cloak”.  I thought about them first, actually, before we started, as friends kindly drove us to St Jean Pied de Port and the Pyrenees loomed ahead.  Would our predecessors have felt daunted?  After a bit, I decided probably not.  Contemporary accounts suggest they were more concerned about being robbed, being cheated, being attacked by wild animals, and falling ill, perhaps because of rotten drinking water, than about a few hills.  But as we relax in Santiago, with the prospect of a short flight home, we remember that if our predecessors wanted to get home, they had to do the whole thing again, by whatever route, in reverse.  Respect.

Well we’ve made it!  It was quite emotional walking up to the top of the Monte de Gozo, ie mount of joy, from where you can see the towers of the cathedral below.  The medieval pilgrim wouldn’t have seen the current towers, which weren’t built, but would have seen the city and cathedral below.  And it was equally emotional walking in to the Plaza de Obradoiro in front of the west door of the cathedral.  We were very lucky in arriving on a beautiful sunny day in late October, so we could not only take photos, but sit on the ground and take it all in for a bit.

Santiago is a mixture these days – my recollection from 30 years ago is that the churches and narrow streets were more prominent in shaping the atmosphere than they are today.  Those building still dominate the old town, of course: the cathedral, the church of San Francisco, the university, the town hall, and the old pilgrim hospital now repurposed into a 5 star hotel.  And the process of getting the compostela as a certificate of having walked here was moving and rewarding, though it brought home the numbers: arriving at about 3pm, I was number 688 for the day.  But right alongside all this are the signs of a tourist centre and of quite a big city.

There are souvenir shops everywhere, selling T shirts, shells, pins, stickers, models of St James, wristbands, neck chains, saucers, coasters, fridge magnets, notebooks, earrings, models of the waymarker stones, and that’s just what I can remember quickly.  Some we have bought, some are quite valuable, others are not, shall we say.  Young people dish out flyers for coach trips to Finisterre, which we actually did today – didn’t see much in the rain.  And there are masses of bars and restaurants, predictably quite a lot more expensive than on the road.

Alongside this again is a busy city.  The traffic here is far more congested than anywhere else we have seen, even Burgos and Leon.  As you come in from Monte de Gozo, the housing estates and industrial and commercial premises stretch up the hill in the distance, and it was clear from our coach trip that this activity extends on other sides of the city too.  The popularity of the pilgrim route will have something to do with this, but it must be linked to wider economic developments in Galicia.

So a medieval pilgrim destination is a bustling modern metropolis.  Personally I don’t regret that: the Camino is not a theme park, and pilgrims and local residents have always interacted in this way.

For the last few days, we have been in Galicia, the fourth administrative region of Spain on the Camino, and the one which includes Santiago.  

It’s very different from the others.  Weather wise, it’s cooler and wetter.  There’s a song from “My Fair Lady” which runs ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain’: not in our case, since the section across the plain was bone dry, and we have had plenty of rain in Galicia, as we expected.  This has predictable implications for the scenery: greener, lusher, and hillier than much of the rest of the Camino.  The path has taken us under chestnut trees generating large conkers at this time of year, and under oak trees so abundant that at times acorns have pretty much covered the path.  There have also been groves of very tall eucalyptus trees.  If much of this sounds like home, it looks that way too, as the picture shows.

The change came quite abruptly, though partly by coincidence.  The long hot spell broke as we reached a town called Villafranca del Bierzo, about 20km from the border between Leon and Galicia.  The route out of Villafranca was a gradual climb, but as the Galician border approached, this became steep and rocky as we left a village called Las Herrerias.  Most unusually – having crossed a few national frontiers invisible on the ground in the past – the path changed as well, within metres of crossing into the new region: a rocky mountain path became a well made wider gravel trail.  Generally, the Camino seems to matter more in Galicia than in some other areas.

Other things are also different.  The Gallegan language is quite prominent:signs explaining, for example, the history of a church will be in Gallegan as well as Spanish, though the place names are less often put in both languages than in the Basque Country.  One clear exception is the first place you come to as a pilgrim, O Cebreiro, which has been welcoming pilgrims for about 1,000 years – when we were here in 1988, it was sometimes known by the Spanish name of El Cebreiro, but not now.  Visually, the farmyards and fields include “horreos”, ventilated cupboards on stilts used to dry maize – the picture shows a fine example with a stone base.  And the dogs are allowed to roam a bit more: many farmyards and villages include a resident Alsatian off the lead keeping an eye on things, though fortunately for me (and no doubt other walkers) they haven’t so far done more than look us up and down.

They must be used to pilgrims.  The Camino is still busy, with an injection of more people and more support vehicles after the town of Sarria, which is a bit over 100km from Santiago, so you can walk from there and still get your compostela certificate.  If we can complete two more days walking (totalling 33), we can get ours.  In the meantime, dinner!

When we followed the Camino in 1988, nobody had heard of the internet.  Now many pilgrims are using apps rather than books for directions and advice, and we are using them as back-up too.  But like many of our generation, we are using a book as the main source of information, and this post celebrates that plus two books which helped shape our first visit.

John Brierley’s “A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago” has been our constant companion.  First written in 2003 and updated almost every year since, it is several books in one.  It sets out the route in some detail, split into 33 stages,with sketch maps of each stage, and town plans of the main places.  It also lists accommodation options, and talks about the history and the buildings along the route.  Not for nothing is it subtitled ‘A Practical and Mystical Manual’ – Brierley offers regular reflections on the spiritual side of the Camino as he sees it.  These won’t appeal to everyone, but we’ve certainly found the book as a whole helpful.  Thank you.

Our enjoyment of the 1988 trip was much enhanced by two very different books.  Robin Neillands’ “The Road to Compostela” is an account of a cycle trip from central France to Santiago, bringing out both the ups and downs of Camino life, and the excitement and romance of following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims.  There are dozens of tales of Camino trips these days, some factual, some fictional, most upbeat, but none of the ones I have read have quite captured the atmosphere in the same way.  

Neilands died some years ago, but the author of the other book from the 1980s, John Hooper, is still writing, now for the Economist.  He has been in Italy for some time, but was then the Guardian’s Spain reporter, and wrote a book called “The New Spaniards” which explained the journey, then barely a decade old, from Franco to democracy and the social changes that had followed.  It was a fascinating companion to what was a new country for me.  Hooper updated it in 2006.  Much has changed since then, but I read that with interest before coming.  With riots in Barcelona as I write, Hooper was far-sighted in commenting that regional nationalism was “the single biggest imponderable in Spain’s future”.  Thanks for all the insights here too.