Tag Archives: Santiago

The beauty of spring lifts the spirits

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So on Friday and Saturday (3-4 May), we did our first long training walk for the Camino: across the Chiltern hills, 22 miles from Princes Risborough to Goring-on-Thames on Friday, and 15 miles from Goring to Henley the following day, carrying bigger rucksacks than usual, with our overnight gear for a night in a pub.  It brought some nice surprises, and some scenes of beauty that really lifted the soul.

The good news is that we came through unscathed in terms of blisters or injuries, and felt that we rather enjoyed it, and could have walked the next day.  That’s a bit of luck, since on the Camino, we have to walk for 33 days, with maybe three rest days in there somewhere!  We were helped by the weather, above all – especially for me – that it wasn’t too hot, but with not much rain either. 

We got a few insights to help with our preparations.  I think I’m going to get a new rucksack, since the one I had worked well, but is 20 years old, so a more modern one might be lighter.  The weight of the sack is heavily influenced by the amount of liquid being carried, so if, as a previous pilgrim said, you can fill your water bottle regularly along the way, that will help no end.  Things felt magically easier after lunch, when we had reduced the load and refuelled, obviously in the same motion.

It was also a start on getting into the right mindset for a long walk.  Friday was more like the Camino than Saturday, in that about four hours of it was along the Ridgeway: some sources say travellers have used it for 5,000 years, so it makes the Camino look recent, but more relevant is that it’s a marked trail heading in much the same direction for long stretches at a time.  Sometimes the terrain varies, sometimes not.  On Saturday, Judith planned and navigated a cross-country route along smaller paths, so we had to map-read more carefully.  I need to find ways of managing through the periods when your rucksack hurts, your feet start to feel sore, and there are many hours still to go.  Tips welcome.

A couple of things helped.  Both days, we came upon refreshment that we weren’t expecting.  On Saturday, there was a café in Stoke Row, at just the right point.  And the day before, we saw a notice outside Nuffield Church, inviting walkers in for tea, coffee and biscuits – as well as the food and drink, I felt lifted by the open-hearted welcome and hospitality from this small Oxfordshire church, and we gladly made a donation in thanks.

Most uplifting of all were the views that epitomise spring in the Chilterns: the sun shining through the fresh bright green leaves on the beech trees, and lighting up the bluebells underneath through the dappled shade. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins writes about:

 “Spring’s universal bliss…
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard apple … 
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lake”

This kind of natural beauty feels sweet-bitter-sweet: the sight makes you glad to be alive, tempered with regret that the leaves will become darker and dustier and the bluebells will fade, balanced by the knowledge that spring comes every year, and different seasons have their high points too. 

Plenty to look forward to and reflect on during the walks to come.

Planning to walk the Camino

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“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.