Pilgrim's Road

were impressive too. The organisation necessary for such a trip, the hundred and one things to consider for so many, was fearsome. All the time I had been talking with the children, the six adults had been hard at work cooking, washing clothes, tending to babies, answering questions and doing the hundred and one things parents have to do anywhere, but with infinitely more difficulty because of coping with such primitive conditions.
    I was invited to share their supper of macaroni, salad, fruit and wine, but was not permitted to help wash up in return because of them having their own routine. Instead I had the decidedly more pleasurable task of holding dear, placid, little baby Henri, while his mother wielded a dish cloth. Afterwards, when the tremendous activity of getting fourteen children washed and ready for bed began, I retired to my tent in a green field behind the monastery, happy to have seen and shared for a while yet another dimension of pilgrimage. The day ended beautifully with a sky full of swallows swooping and darting low over the meadow, while from all sides came the distant lowing of cattle.
    And that was the end of my period of pleasant contentment for a while, because after Sarria came a very dreary and heavy bit of the pilgrimage. The weather did not help; I had woken to a grey overcast day that drained the landscape of its magic. The town of Puertomarín depressed me still further. It was a small town that had been built to replace an ancient one, sacrificed some years before to the building of a dam on the River Miño and lying now beneath the waters of the newly created lake. Like all such re-sited towns, the sense of its upheaval still hung over it, giving it a melancholy air. It appeared to be rootless. Nowhere was this more apparent than in its large fortress-like Romanesque church which had been moved stone by stone to this present site. The great Abu Simbel temple in Upper Egypt, re-sited at a cost of billions of dollars after the building of the Aswan Dam, has much the same feeling of the spirit of the place having fled elsewhere.
    Standing there in this stripped-down church, I felt that all connection with the pilgrimage had vanished. The journey had lost its momentum and suddenly I wanted desperately for it to come to an end. There and then I decided to push on to Santiago. I had, I felt, to get there today; another night would be too much.
    This was easier said than done, for the terrain seemed designed expressly to defeat haste. The hills never let up and it began to seem like the hardest day’s cycling of the whole journey. Under a cold grey drizzle I began to notice the discarded rubbish lying along the verges and in the hedges more than the pretty sloping fields with their neat slate walls.
    It became even less pleasurable once the route led me back to the main roads and the callous speeding traffic. Bunyan would have approved I thought grimly: there had obviously been altogether too much enjoyment in this pilgrimage and not nearly enough struggle. Now the only thing left was to grit the teeth and concentrate on the cycling.
    I had a temporary respite from this bleak period when I made the short detour to the isolated Romanesque church of Vilar de Donas, against whose damp interior walls, bright green with mould, stand some of the fine funereal effigies of the Knights of Santiago. There were also some lovely frescoes of the Annunciation and the Resurrection still glowing on the walls of the apse in spite of the damp. The whole building was rather stunning in fact, standing there miles from anywhere on a pitted and ruinous little country road, and it cheered me up no end.
    But there was nothing else of architectural merit to make me pause in any of the towns now until Santiago itself. I only stopped at Melide because I could not continue without a meal, having covered forty-eight miles since striking camp that morning. I had a further thirty-five to do if I was to make Santiago that day.
    I met a Belgian pilgrim in Melide, a walker who was also having a bad day. The walkers’ track, he told me, was in an awful state; he had not had dry feet since he could remember. He thought he would need three more days to reach Santiago, but hoped to do it in two. Listening to the resignation and tiredness in his voice I realised again how much harder is the pilgrimage for walkers, how endless the bleak featureless stretches like this one must seem. Perhaps even Harrie might feel some sense of