On This Holy Island:
A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain
ISBN 9781399409049
eISBN 9781399409056
ASIN B0CQ5N867P
This volume came recommended by a professor I follow on twitter who focuses on Pilgrimage. I had some pretty high expectations based on the hype I has seen. My first disappointment was that the volume was not available in North America. I had to skirt some corners to get the eBook through an account registered in the UK (thank you old work address). Once I got it; it did not go as expected. It took me a while to get going and it took a while to read.
The description of this book states:
“Acclaimed travel writer Oliver Smith sets out to radically reframe our idea of 'pilgrimage' in Britain by retracing sacred travel made across time, from murmurs of ritual journeys in the depths of Ice Age to new pilgrimages of the 21st century.
He embarks on an epic adventure across sacred British landscapes - climbing into remote sea caves, sleeping inside Neolithic tombs, scaling forgotten holy mountains and once marooning himself at sea. Following holy roads to churches, cathedrals and standing stones, this evocative and enlightening travelogue explores places prehistoric, pagan and Christian, but also reveals how football stadiums and music festivals have become contemporary places of pilgrimage.
The routes walked are often ancient, the pilgrims he meets are always modern. But underpinning the book is a timeless truth: that making journeys has always been a way of making meaning. So often, Oliver finds, "the unravelling of a path goes in tandem with the unravelling of the soul."”
The chapters in this book are:
Prologue
1 A Causeway
2 A Cave
3 A Ridge
4 An Island
5 An Archipelago
6 A Road
7 A Mountain
8 A Well
9 A Railway
10 A Pub
11 A Stadium
12 The Stones
I highlighted a few passages early in the volume, but gave up part way through. Those I highlighted are:
“I made myself a promise–if I lost my job, I would walk the Camino de Santiago. I pictured the revolving doors of a grey office spinning to reveal silver estuaries and snowy cordilleras. I imagined I would carry my cardboard box of redundancy clutter–my hole punch, my desk lamp–across Galician pine forests, into meadows where my footsteps roused clouds of butterflies. Into walled towns where bells of ancient bronze rang from high towers. I would nap in the shade of a monastery cloister, using my P45 as a pillow.”
“After the end of the first millennium (when everyone was relieved the world didn’t end in the Earth’s thousandth year) cathedrals soared, shrines flourished–this was a time when the pilgrim pathways climbed high, and everyone trod the trail. Chaucer wrote a poem about it. It dipped, then dropped off a cliff edge after the Reformation–when pilgrimage was outlawed in the reign of Henry VIII, the shrines were demolished and the paths became overgrown. They never scaled the same giddy heights again.”
“I did not belong to any religion. Rather, my faith was in the road. I had worked most of my career as a salaried travel writer for a publishing company.”
“This book charts ideas of pilgrimage across time and landscape–from a Palaeolithic burial in a sea cave to modern music festivals–via holy wells, holy mountains, and above all holy islands.”
“This is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road. Nor is it about re-enacting the journeys of the Middle Ages. It is not a definitive catalogue of pilgrimage destinations–but a personal selection of journeys that you might perhaps choose to undertake yourself. It is a very modern pilgrimage: of ancient paths but also of Gore-Tex, of sacred spaces and also of Welcome Breaks and Ginsters pasties along the way.”
I have read many volumes about pilgrimage, mostly about Santiago de Compostela
City in Spain, and other in the CTS Christian Shrines series. And a few written nearly 100 years ago by Alice Curtyane about sites in Ireland. But though I started this volume with great excitement it waned as I progressed and I started taking longer and longer to get back to reading it. To be honest I only finished it because of the effort I went through to get it, otherwise it likely would have ended up on my ‘did not finish’ pile. Of the dozen chapters\sites there were 2 I really enjoyed, 3 I found interesting and a few I just did not get the point.
Overall I finished the book feeling flat. Like those in the final chapter looking back at the glory days of their movement and Stonehenge. The writing is decent. The sites and pilgrimages, their history often interesting. The book just did not click with me.
Note: This book is part of a series of reviews: 2025 Catholic Reading Plan!
Books by Oliver Smith:
The Atlas of Abandoned Places
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