V is for Via Francigena
Roads go on / While we forget, and are / Forgotten like a star / That shoots and is gone. Edward Thomas
The Via Francigena, a medieval pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome, begins just a few minutes’ walk from St. Augustine’s Abbey. Head along the evocatively named Spring Lane and a handy footpath sign points you to the Pilgrims Way and the start of your journey to Rome (a mere one thousand two hundred mile walk away). Known as ‘The French Way’, the route takes travellers along the ridge of the North Downs and across the Channel to France, through Switzerland, down the boot of Italy to reach Rome. Alongside Santiago de Compostela in Spain and Jerusalem, the Eternal City is one of the three main destinations for the forty-thousand who complete the Via Francigena each year.
But why, when there are quicker and less footsore ways to travel, do we still undertake these journeys? For many, the reasons are of course religious. The Via Francigena follows in the footsteps of Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury who travelled to Rome in 990. Walkers can replicate the archbishop’s seventy-nine stages and have their ‘pilgrims passport’ stamped. Yet, today less than one in six of those walking the route cite religious reasons.
In the last few years, there has been a marked increase in secular pilgrimage; long distance journeys, normally on foot that have a purpose beyond the purely transportational. In our increasingly online and sedentary lives, the appeal of a challenge, of overcoming hardship might be part of the attraction, though unlike the pilgrims who visit Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Via Francigena doesn’t, thankfully, require body-length prostrations along its route.
From twee garden notices encouraging us to ‘stop and smell the roses’, to slow food, slow travel and even slow TV, the modern world is obsessed with curbing the pace of life. Long distance walking offers us a way to live in the moment, to enjoy the journey not the destination. Walking is a defining act of being: being in a body; being in a place. Compare it to the dislocation we feel during air travel, when distance is measured in time. Walking is the very opposite experience. We feel every inch of the way under our feet; we experience it in real time (and at times in real discomfort).
Links between walking and wellbeing are well established, as are the connections between walking and creativity. From well-known walkers like Wordsworth, Thoreau and Virginal Woolf to Iain Sinclair, Olivia Laing and Rebecca Solnit walking and pilgrimage become an act of the imagination, a way to open ourselves up to place and possibility.
John Muir, the Scottish conservationist who’s ecological writing and tireless campaigning established America’s first National Parks, may have been onto something when he wrote in his journals ‘I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’
Pilgrimage routes like the Via Francigena become as much about the inner journey as the outer one, perhaps we walk to find out who we are.
Caroline Millar manages a national walking project (Discovering Britain) for the Royal Geographical Society and is a sessional lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has written about walking for The Guardian and has a monthly column in Kent Life.
The University will also be hosting a two-day conference on Canterbury and other UNESCO World Heritage Sites around the world on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May at Old Sessions House, Longport.
