Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 5: Boughton Lees to Canterbury

13 miles

Crying in Canterbury Cathedral was how I ended day 5 on the Pilgrims’ Way.

So, yes, I made it. The final 13 miles started off damp and continued that way, disrupted only by occasional heavy drenching rain for variety. Consequently, at the points where pilgrims often catch a first glimpse of the distant spires I saw nothing but drizzle.

In fact it wasn’t until I was into Canterbury that I first got a glimpse of the Cathedral. I was then tempted then to walk straight towards it but instead followed the route suggested in the guidebook. And though slightly longer, and my feet were VERY sore, I was so glad I did because it took me in via the old city gates. And then as I walked down High Street I suddenly felt a surge of delight as I recognised the street the crowds march down in A Canterbury Tale while in the nearby tearooms US Sergeant Bob Johnson in meets his friends and receives his own personal miracle.

I turned down Mercery Lane to see the very same view he and thousands upon thousands of other pilgrims have seen; the narrow way to Christchurch Gate and the Cathedral beyond it.

I didn’t cry at this point.

In the film British soldier Peter Gibbs, in his former civilian life, played the organ in a cinema. But on accidentally meeting the Cathedral organist he ends up playing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor by J. S. Bach as hundreds of people stream into the Cathedral to give thanks, mourn their losses and seek courage for the battles ahead.

I went to Evensong, and as the organ music began, my tears started. It seemed to me at that moment that my ‘thin place’ was not the sacred and beautiful space of the Cathedral but the sound of the organ playing in that ancient place, a building that co-mingles in me as the physical place today and the fictional-placed version of the 1944 film.

So perhaps it’s not about actual places at all. After all, it is humans who bestow meanings on places. Perhaps the ‘thinness’ was within me, as my heart and mind created a moment in which the “membrane between the mundane and the metaphysical” vanished.

Oliver Smith writes of his pilgrimage journeys that,

“The people I met there were in some way ‘thin’ too: their barriers were down, they were quick to tell their story…

So often the unfurling of a path went in tandem with the unravelling of a human heart.”

_{Oliver Smith, On This Holy Island,}  2024

The idea behind the London to Canterbury walk was to help me reflect on where and who I am following Graham’s death. We, as a couple, shared a life. We didn’t mirror each other but there was an interlocking, a pivoting around reflection. Or perhaps I mean we lived in a state of refraction between us?

I’ve lost that reflection, of having some kind of a line of symmetry. However now there is a prism; I see Graham in me, and in his family and friends. I love hearing stories of Graham before I was in his life. I’m hungry for things I never knew about him, new lenses and different angles on who he was.

In his heartfelt appreciation of A Canterbury Tale, film critic Xan Brooks writes: 

“What I love most about A Canterbury Tale is the way that it roots its magic and mysticism in the humdrum everyday. I love the way it casts ordinary people as vessels of greatness, unwitting keepers of the flame. The film harks back to a time of glory, the old pilgrims on the ancient road, while simultaneously reminding us that there was no time of glory, or rather that every time is a time of glory, that we live in flux and that’s OK. The only world is the one that’s here, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes are the people around us, frail and fearful and coping as best they can. Powell and Pressburger’s pilgrims have a hat-full of troubles and no idea where they’re going. They strive and they falter and leave very little trace. But along the way, they receive blessings…

“All of them are frayed at the edges and ostensibly unremarkable. All of them, the film assures us, are utterly precious and deserving of miracles.”

_{Xan Brooks, A pilgrim’s progress: on the trail of A Canterbury Tale, The Guardian, 9 August 2013}

To step on to the Pilgrim’s Way – to go on pilgrimage – suggests that there comes a time when we must also step off that old road, withdraw from the fallow time and stop slipping between worlds.

But if the magic lies within us then it no longer matters whether we’re on pilgrimage or not. We are our own miracles.

Graham’s gone. He’s now an underlander; part of that space where we keep the things precious to us and the things we want to preserve but which is also home to things we have lost or cannot bear to have too close. I’ll always be saying goodbye to Graham, but while I, and others who knew him are still alive, the pilgrimage is still quietly happening.

The unexpected end to the journey is that pilgrimage is everything we do, every day, not only in the marvellous but in the mundane too, in the love and the joy and in the pain and the sorrow.

“It’s an old song… a sad song…. but we sing it anyway.”

_{Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown, 2019}

See all photos from day 5 on Flickr

Preceding post: Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 4: Aylesford to Boughton Lees