Pilgrim's Road

studded with monasteries, Romanesque churches and romantic ruins, and pointed to an intriguing and challenging journey, though one very different from my usual adventures. Getting away from the beaten track is usually my goal, whereas this route had been trodden by millions of pilgrim feet, and even in an increasingly materialistic world it had never completely fallen into disuse. The thought that so time-honoured a road was still followed today made it all the more intriguing. Within an hour of the postcard landing on my mat I had made up my mind to accept the challenge, and immediately set about making my preparations.
    The first thing to decide upon was from which of the four traditional pilgrim starting places or assembly points, should I begin my journey. The most northerly of them, Paris, was convenient for those coming from Britain, Germany, the Low Countries and Northern France, and clearly would be the easiest for me. But its rallying place, the church of St Jacques de la Boucherie, has long since been torn down in the interests of road widening, and only its great square tower now remains. Besides, the route from Paris goes through Orléans, Tours, Poitiers and Bordeaux, towns already familiar to me; I had a hankering for fresh pastures.
    The most southerly route, which served those coming up from Italy and the South of France, begins at Arles and goes through Montpelier and Toulouse. This attracted me far more, but again it was countryside that I had already travelled, and it would also mean an extra few hundred miles to reach the start of the journey.
    Le Puy, on the western side of the Massif Central, was nearer, and had the distinction of being the starting place of the first recorded St James pilgrimage when, in 951, the Bishop of Le Puy led some of his faithful flock to Compostela and back again. I almost plumped for this tempting route through the Auvergne, which offered the additional delights of the medieval towns of Moissac and Conques. However, in the end I chose to begin in Vézelay, the assembly point for the Burgundians, mainly because I had long wanted to visit the famous Church of La Madeleine, also known as the church of the ‘Men on the March’ — a name to stir the blood of any traveller. Also, the south-westerly course from Vézelay appeared to promise the sort of rustic idyll that fitted my idea of pilgrimage, passing as it does over the many tributaries of the Loire, and through the valleys of the north-eastern edge of the Massif Central; with such towns as Charité sur Loire, Bourges, Perigeux, La Rèole and Bazas to add their spice of medieval architecture and history.
    By the time I reached the foot of the Pyrenees, three of the routes would have come together, and the fourth, the one from Arles, would join soon afterwards at Puente la Reina — the Queen’s Bridge. From that point to the shrine of St James, the four routes would be a single pathway striking westward across the varied landscape of northern Spain, through villages and towns that had been associated with the cult of St James for the last thousand years and more.
     
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    Having decided on my starting point, everything else fell neatly into place. Three weeks later, at the beginning of April — Chaucer’s pilgrim season — I was waking up in Vézelay. Conveniently placed in the centre of France, in the rich lands of Burgundy, it was a site that had witnessed the making of much of Europe’s history; here the Second Crusade was preached; at the steps of the high altar Richard Coeur de Lion had kept his vigil before setting out with his armies for the Holy Land; and from the tenth century onwards an endless river of pilgrims assembled here at the start of their long journey to Santiago de Compostela — St James of the Field of the Star. In a moving ceremony the pilgrims’ small satchels, known as scrips, their staffs, their drinking gourds and their scallop shells — the symbols of St James — were blessed; and after making their confessions and taking communion, they donned their wind-resisting cloaks and their broad-brimmed hats — the front traditionally fastened back with a large scallop shell badge — and no doubt deeply affected by the stirring prayers of the ‘Pilgrim’s Itinerarium’, they would stride off purposefully down ‘The Way’ towards distant Compostela, their feet not yet blistered nor frost-bitten, eager to cover the miles and to reap their eventual reward of a place in