Assumption pilgrimage with Will and Lasz

15th August 2018 (Feast of the Assumption of the BVM)
Canterbury area

Will Parsons from the British Pilgrimage Trust took Laszlo and I on the last stage of what they've styled "The Old Way", a kind of reinvented pilgrimage route from Southampton to Canterbury (based on Britain's oldest road map). This involved him driving us (rather counterintuitively) to Patrixbourne where we met the vicar of St. Mary's church there, and selected a pilgrim's staff from a collection leaning against a wall. The pilgrimage took us spiralling into Canterbury via Bekesbourne Church and St Mary's, Fordwich plus a few springs and holy wells.

The BPT are attempting to revive pilgrimage as a secular activity, so have decided to focus on water as a central theme (one everyone can agree about). So there's a little water song that he got us to sing each time we stopped to drink from a source (carefully filtered via his hi-tech device). We came in via the golf course in the Scotland Hills. I mentioned that this was where Richard Sinclair had written "Golf Girl", one fact Will was unaware of (like me, he's very clued up about the minutiae of local history and culture). As we emerged from the foliage, the first golfer we saw happened to be a woman, but we didn't stop to ask her if her name was Pat. We stopped at St. Martin's (the oldest continually used Christian church in the English-speaking world, Queen Bertha's private chapel where Augustine baptised King Ethelbert in 597AD) and drank from a nearby spring I was entirely unaware of. By the time we made it to the Cathedral, we were too late to be admitted for Evensong, but were able to sit by a side entrance in the cloisters and listen.

Will also showed us the location of what he believes to have been St. Thomas's Well (the primary water source for Christchurch Priory back in the Middle Ages).