Pilgrim's Road

to see this unique monument. Anyway, the wind could well die down before I had to turn around and face it; or, hope being the bedrock of travellers, it could even change direction at the same time as I did and continue to blow in my favour.
    Whatever the outcome, it was a wonderfully exhilarating run out eastward to San Miguel. I even had to apply the brakes in the isolated little adobe villages I passed for fear of causing casualties among the straying hen population.
    San Miguel de Escalada is the largest Mozarabic church in Spain and it stands at the end of the little road, quite alone among green fields, its grey stone walls and tall tower appearing at first sight not unlike the ancient Celtic oratories of Ireland. The closer I came to it, however, the more impressive it appeared and quite unlike anything else I had seen. There must once have been a considerable monastery there, but now only the church itself remains, skilfully restored and very beautiful. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I would certainly have been sorry to miss it.
    It was built early in the tenth century by Christian craftsmen who had been living in Islamic Spain, and although the Moorish influence is clear in details such as the horseshoe arches, the Mozarabic style, as it is known, is quite different to the Mudéjar architecture that I had seen at Sahagún. San Miguel was a stone structure of great lightness and delicacy, particularly its cloisters and the forest of lovely slender columns inside, which is also typical of Islamic architecture. In many ways the interior reminded me strongly of the Galilee chapel in Durham Cathedral which also has a strong Eastern influence and appears equally strange and fascinating. The Roman Rite was only finally adopted throughout Spain in the eleventh century; before that time Constantinople was still the centre of Christendom and local versions of the Eastern Rite held sway. This was reflected here in the columns forming a division between the chancel and the body of the church which would have carried the iconostasis — a focus for devotion and a barrier to preserve the mysteries of the sanctum from the eyes of the uninitiated — a detail which made the building seem even more exotic.
    Lovely as the place was it also reflected, as Sahagún had done, the sad division between two great faiths, since the genius of both was so plainly visible in this building. Christianity and Islam have been in a state of outright war or armed neutrality for so long that the common ground that should exist between them remains largely unexplored. Yet Western and Islamic scholarship and art have so influenced one another over the centuries that they are, as in these churches, inseparably linked. It seems to me that it is in the common misconceptions of great faiths and ideas that destructive forces are able to work. How far, I wondered, did such twisted concepts as St James ‘Godly 5 Moor Slayer, or the teaching of ‘Better dead than not a Muslim’ underlie such appalling actions as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ going on today in the Balkans and in Israel?
    The wind force and direction remaining equally implacable, I paid for the effortless ride out to San Miguel, by a muscle-cracking, twenty-mile struggle to León, and when I reached the outskirts, with its acres of soulless looking high-rise flats, it seemed hardly worth the effort. Where was the marvellous city I had been led to expect? Shelter, rest and food seemed more urgent requirements than sight-seeing at this stage, however, and it was the refugio that I was most eager to locate, so I pushed on towards the centre of the city in search of it. I stopped once when I caught sight of the small church of St Anna, marooned and overshadowed among the towering buildings. The priest was just locking up after mass, but he kindly stamped my card and pointed out the one slab of medieval fresco that remained after the recent modernisation. After that, I was soon through the worst of the daunting periphery and then many tempting sights did indeed present themselves, including the splendid walls of León, but for once I was tired enough to be able to resist them.
    Whether the refugio actually existed I never really found out, because in the process of trying to discover its whereabouts among the extensive restoration work in the monastery of San Isidoro, I was kidnapped by a lovely man called Paco who took me off to stay with his wife and two small children in a modest