Mons Gaudium, the mountain of joy, was the name given by pilgrims to the hill from which they could spot Jerusalem for the first time. It marked the final stage of a dangerous journey, which would have taken months, if not years, to complete.
Every major medieval pilgrimage route had its version of Mons Gaudium. My own journey – a five-day trek through the rolling hills of the Scottish borders – could not compare to a medieval voyage to Jerusalem, but I still felt genuine joy on the Kyloe Hills in Northumberland looking out over the sea. There, shimmering on the horizon of a bright September day, was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
Sheep scattered as I bounded down the grassy slopes, forgetting for a moment the pain in my knees. My journey was nearly at an end, but I still faced a nagging question: was I really a pilgrim?
Pilgrimage is more popular in the west than it has been for centuries. Nearly half a million people completed the Camino (Spanish for “path”) to Santiago de Compostela in 2024, historically one of Europe’s most important pilgrimage routes. In 1972, the records show just 67 pilgrims.
In Britain, a 2024 YouGov survey commissioned by the British Pilgrimage Trust, a charity launched in 2014, found that 9.2 per cent of adults in Britain had already made a pilgrimage. A further 19 per cent – nearly 8 million people – were considering it.
The revival has coincided with the continuing decline of Christianity in the west. Why are people going? And are they actually pilgrims?
Pilgrimage is a slippery concept. The word comes from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “being away from your own land or home”. At its core, it involves going on a physical journey to a designated site. But there is also a deeper aspect. The hope is that the act of travelling becomes a spur to self-realisation and inner growth.
Historically, these ritual journeys have been firmly tied to religion. In the high Middle Ages, pilgrimage was big business. If you include local saints’ shrines alongside the major routes to Jerusalem or Rome, then it is likely that the vast majority of medieval Christians performed some form of pilgrimage in their lives. The naked exploitation of pilgrims, and the superstitious aspects, made the practice a target for reformers. “All pilgrimages should be done away with; for there is no good in them, no commandment, but countless causes of sin and of contempt of God’s commandments,” Martin Luther wrote in 1520.
The modern variant is proudly agnostic. For example, the British Pilgrimage Trust says it wants “to make pilgrimage accessible to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or background”. The practice helps to “nurture our relationship with the land” and adds “meaning and purpose to our lives”, the charity says. The 250 routes listed on their website include a wide variety of destinations. The majority are centred on churches or cathedrals, but there’s a healthy smattering of springs, stone circles and river mouths on the website too.
I am an atheist but my “pilgrimage” route, St Cuthbert’s Way, was clearly Christian themed: connecting Melrose Abbey, where Cuthbert first joined the monastery in 651AD, to Lindisfarne, where he served as bishop and was canonised shortly after his death in 687AD. The Holy Island itself has been a site of Christian worship since the early seventh century.
That said, the geography of Holy Island gives it a charisma that even the most convinced materialist can feel. Twice a day the island is cut off from the mainland by the North Sea. At low tide, you can walk across the mudflats to the island. Out on the flats, the sea, land and sky do not just meet, they merge. Each seems to reflect the other. The wooden sticks that guide you from shore to shore provide the only sense of fixed definition, a line through the haze.
Before embarking on their journey, medieval pilgrims would often write a will in case anything should happen to them on the route, an indication of how dangerous travel could be back then. There’s been no recorded deaths on the sands to Lindisfarne, but I thought there’s a first time for everything. I quickly drew up a will and left it on the fridge for my flatmates. “In the event of my demise, the cat gets everything,” I scrawled. (The cat has been looking at me funny ever since.)
Having got my affairs in order, I started the journey north. The weather forecast for the week ahead was bleak: rainy and windy every day. I was staying overnight with friends in Edinburgh before heading to the start of the path in Melrose, a small town in the Scottish Borders. “If at any point you want to come back, then just let us know,” they said. It was all starting to feel a bit ominous.
Nevertheless, I dutifully traipsed off to Melrose on Monday morning. I didn’t get off to a good start. Out of the town, the trail quickly climbs up the side of the Eildon Hills, three peaks which dominate the border lands. The rain was nowhere to be seen. Instead it was warm, and I was overdressed. I slowly climbed the hill, sweat starting to sting my eyes. Pausing at the top for water, I struggled to catch my breath. My head hurt, my bag felt too heavy and my eyes strained through the sweat. Maybe it had been a good decision to write my will after all.
But from there the path got easier, leading down to the banks of the River Tweed. I stopped at a church which had a prayer for passing pilgrims. It urged the walker to find “the imprint of the infinite in all that you see”, a sentiment I tried to carry with me over the following days.
This romantic appreciation of nature is an important inspiration for modern pilgrimage, and is part of the reason I had picked St Cuthbert’s Way. The route takes you along riverbanks, through forests and over hills before the dramatic walk across the sands to Lindisfarne.
The desire to authentically connect to the past felt like another crucial pillar of my pilgrimage. Through walking, I hoped to understand the landscape in the way that Cuthbert might have. Both of these goals could be understood as “spiritual”. They were attempts to anchor my life in a wider architecture of meaning.
But having done a bit of homework before my journey, I knew that I had to be careful about my grand aims. Modern pilgrims like me may be tracing the footsteps of our ancestors, but our attitudes are very different.
Dr Anne Bailey at the University of Oxford argues that for medieval pilgrims, the trip was often about the destination, not the journey. “For many, the journey to a saint’s shrine seems to have had little or no spiritual value, and it was only when their destination was reached that penitential exercises were performed,” she writes.
She cites the example of Margery Kempe, a prolific 15th-century pilgrim who managed to complete a round trip to Santiago in 25 days, less time than it takes modern pilgrims to walk the Camino through France. Her outbound journey lasted just seven days, because she took the boat from Bristol directly to the northwestern tip of Spain. She clearly wanted the journey to end as soon as possible.
Another pilgrim, Abbot Daniel, admitted to “doing every kind of unworthy deed” on his route to Jerusalem, sins which would be atoned upon arrival at the holy sites. The transfer of meaning from destination to journey reflects our modern discomfort with the idea that certain places are genuinely imbued with special powers.
Of course, Christians in medieval Europe do not have a monopoly on the idea of pilgrimage, and there were many different experiences of pilgrimage even in medieval times. But we should be cautious: just because we are walking the same trails and using the same language, it does not mean we are in some way continuing an unbroken tradition of spiritual wandering. If I was a pilgrim, I was a distinctively modern pilgrim, guided by modern sensibilities.
And it was not just the inner journey that had changed, so too had the physical landscape. The village of Morebattle, which marked the halfway point of my journey, had once been a lakeside town. But the lake had gradually shrunk, before finally being drained in the 19th century. The village church still stood on a hill overlooking the site of the lake, only now it looked across rows of neat fields.
Making my way between the towns and villages, I often saw no one in the fields or the hills. But in pre-modern Britain, the countryside would have been much more densely populated given the importance of agriculture, and the need for many more labourers. The deserted landscapes in which I found it easiest to connect to the past were, in many ways, modern creations.
As I started my final descent to the shoreline, I stopped at a bench with fantastic views across to Lindisfarne. Two sisters were sitting there, and they invited me to join them. What brought them to these hills? They had walked the first half last year, and were now completing the route. Theirs was a different kind of pilgrimage, a personal act of remembrance. “Our mother died three years ago and our father died sometime before, but they were both keen walkers. Every year we try to go on a walking trip around one of their birthdays to remember them. It’s a kind of little pilgrimage,” they said.
We walked together for the rest of the day, swapping notes on the walk and giving thanks for the miraculously good weather – it had barely rained all week!
The sisters would finish their pilgrimage the day after me, so I crossed the sands the next morning alone. Following the wooden sticks that guided the way, I found myself thinking less about my grand spiritual ambitions, which seemed as spectral as the early morning light. Instead, I thought about the people I love, the people I’ve lost, and the people I fear I’m on the cusp of losing. I tried to carry them all with me as I approached the end of my walk. Only then did I feel comfortable describing myself as a pilgrim.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
