Equus Asinus

Day 3 of Walking Out of the World: a two thousand kilometer 86-day pilgrimage to Compostela on foot across England and France to the north west corner of Spain.

(Previous post: Day 2 Tewkesbury to Wycke Rissington)

Good morning pilgrims! Welcome to any members of the Confraternity of Saint James joining this virtual pilgrimage. A link for it is now posted on the CSJ website: https://www.csj.org.uk/blog/walking-out-of-the-world

In the previous days walking from Worcester, I talked about obtaining stamps for my credencial or pilgrim passport. Now there is a more complete explanation of the purpose of pilgrim records in the Walking Out of the World drop-down menu above. The WOW Pilgrim’s Guide to this virtual pilgrimage will contain practical information, maps, book references, etc. The sort of left-brain thing that we don’t want cluttering up the conversation here as we pilgrims walk.

As I explained on pitching my tent in the hidden corner of a farmer’s field near the village of Wycke Rissington, it is important to be up and on the road early when camping surreptitiously. Leaving no trace of my stay, I washed in a stream in a small copse next to the Oxfordshire Way (map: see arrow). The rain had gone and it was a bright Sunday morning. I hoped there would be a communion service in the village church.

At the parish church of Saint Laurence I found that I was in luck: the church was open for cleaning and flower arranging but I would have to wait a couple of hours for the service. One of the difficulties of a walking pilgrimage is that the pilgrim spends much of the day in the middle of nowhere and finding a Mass or communion service can be difficult. Some of these parish churches in the English countryside now open on alternate Sundays or even monthly and it is a similar situation in France and Spain.

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It sometimes takes some discipline to delay your continuing walk when you find that your route plan for the day does not coincide with the times of parish church or the cathedral worship. But the decision to delay and make time is precisely the attitude of mind that the pilgrim should adopt. Why call it a pilgrimage – and not simply a recreational walk – if we are not going to seek out the numinous in the places we walk through?

From long experience as a pilgrim wayfarer, I have learned that the deliberate delay – loitering with intent, as we used to call it in parish missions – is often the start of the best discoveries even if it costs an hour or two of daylight for walking. The gifts received on pilgrimage often come from these moments of delay and a morning in Wycke Rissington turned out to be its own reward.

Forty years ago I learned that the medieval parish churches of the English countryside are kept running, not by priests but by flower arrangers and hassock weavers. I visited many churches while making an audio-visual about medieval communications and these ladies with old faded yellow dusters in their hands were the keepers of the local knowledge. Today the church of Saint Laurence was opened by two such ladies who put a cup of tea and some biscuits in my hands, for they knew what a pilgrim required. As they carried on with their cleaning they cheerfully sang for me: Bunyan’s hymn “To be a pilgrim.” I didn’t join in as I sipped the hot tea and ate the thin plain biscuits: the first food since yesterday’s lunch.

After I had thanked the stalwort ladies for the tea and biscuits I washed up the tea mug in the vestry sink and sat down in an ancient carved oak pew at the back of the church to pass an hour with my prayer rope. I found myself in imagination repeating the previous day’s footsteps from Tewkesbury to here. The previous day’s bluebell woods, green hillsides, farm animals and villages had become imprinted on my memory and I could mentally walk the whole route again.

For the second hour of waiting for communion, I explored the church of St Laurence. There is a very fine 1915 stained glass window in the Arts and Crafts movement pre-Raphaelite style. I was reminded that William Morris once lived not far from here. Then I looked at the organ and was astonished to see a brass plaque recording that Gustav Holst had once been the church organist. For a few moment, some bars of Jupiter – the Bringer of Jollity – went through my head as I gazed at the organ once played by the composer of The Planets suite. For the first time on this pilgrimage, on Day 3, it was clear that I was slipping into the serendipitous world of the spiritual wayfarer in which many things begin to join together and form a pattern. I felt deeply moved, for a reason which was entirely unclear, and then I turned to a different wall and saw the maze.

A plan of a maze that a former rector once constructed in his garden for his parishioners to walk around pausing at stations for prayer. He was inspired by a dream. What a marvellous sign for a pilgrim! Especially one who would be passing through Chartres in three weeks time and revisiting the great maze in the flagstones of the nave.

The present incumbent turned out to be a lady priest and there was no organ player. The Communion service was Book of Common Prayer, with which I had lost familiarity twenty years ago, and the small congregation of a dozen parishioners were welcoming – with formal smiles – but had no great warmth to share with one more passing walker on the Oxforshire Way.

I had already received my spiritual nourishment from the hours waiting for the service and I decided to forego the bread and chalice, quietly leaving by the side door and shouldering my rucsack left outside the porch. I re-wound the prayer rope onto the bourdon and set off. The badly hummed Bringer of Jollity saw me through the next few miles until I got distracted and – somehow, somewhere – I left the Oxfordshire Way and wandered lost in the countryside on a compass direction going north east but there were no paths or roads going south east where I needed to be.

I had my Ordnance Survey map (sheet 164) ready for the Oxfordshire part of the route and kept checking, but I didn’t see anything in the landscape that told me I was on this map. Getting lost while walking is an ever-present hazard on pilgrimage, and it is always a great relief when the panic is over, particularly when it provides a symbolic sign to the pilgrim. I found the south-eastbound path I was looking for by Sarsden Cross (map).

Sarsden Cross is an interesting monument and clearly a medieval pilgrimage waymarker. But experts say it is either 14th century or 19th century, which is an admission of archaeological ignorance that you don’t often see from “experts”.

Their reasoning is there’s no way of telling if it was reassembled in the 19th century from stones carved in the 14th century. Really? You could say that about Stonehenge. Or maybe that’s a bad example as there would probably be some Victorian plans in a library in Salisbury and it would have been redesignated the Prince Albert Neolithic Bandstand. Sorry about that. These are the inner conversations that run through the solitary pilgrim’s head. When you get two pilgrims meeting up and walking together the conversation usually deteriorates further.

Now, where was I? Oh yes. Lost.

I discovered I was already on my sheet 164 map and I had been on it for some time, but had failed to match it to the landscape till now. I picked up the d’Arcy Dalton Way from here. To get onto it I had to negotiate a deliberately sabotaged gate, where the mechanism had been jammed with a block of wood to prevent walkers from entering the Sarsden Estate to use the public bridleway. My Swiss army knife removed this obstacle after a few minutes work! Ultreïa! The Sarsden Estate will not stand in the way of any pilgrim heading for Compostela.

I hit a road, then a main road, bought overpriced sandwiches for lunch from a petrol station shop, and passed the Oxfordshire Way again. The path was running to the north-east now, so I said goodbye to it and carried on south-east with a reliable OS map to guide me. In Ascott-under-Wychwood some residents looked up from their Sunday gardening and seeing the bourdon and the scallop shells on my rucsack, asked me if I was walking all the way to Compostela. They were pleased when I told them I was indeed, and they wanted to know how long it would take and how I would cross the Channel, where I would stay at night?

It was a rare moment, meeting people who know what you are doing, for mostly the English have lost all touch with their old pre-Reformation traditions. The reactions of most English people to an oncoming large pilgrim staff are usually suspicion and nervousness. People with dogs on a village green tend to quickly call their dogs to them, put them on the leash and feed them biscuits, muttering pacifying words. Maybe they think the dogs will act aggressively towards the pilgrim staff or will want it thrown for them to retrieve?

There was certainly nothing to be fearful about: after the third day from Worcester carrying the bourdon my arms and shoulders were agonised with pain. Walking with a 15th century replica pilgrim staff was a new experience but I wondered if it would be practically possible to continue?
Should I leave it with my daughter when I reached London and ask her to have it shipped back to Katherine Lack in Worcester?

I finished early on this third day because my arms could not continue. My legs were fine and the Scarpa boots were wonderful. Even the weather had been kinder, with just a couple of short showers. But the bourdon was killing me. I found a place to pitch the tent. It was a quiet glade of bluebells off the Wychwood Way, in Hatching Hill in the Wychwood Forest (map). And I went to sleep quickly wondering why all these place names reminded me of a Rupert Bear story.

I dreamed of Rupert Bear dressed as a Compostela pilgrim fighting off skeletons armed with bourdons the size of tree trunks. In the village of nearby Leafield next day, they told me Wychwood Forest was known as one of the world’s top haunted forests. I looked it up later, but nowhere does the legend mention Rupert Bear, or how he fought off skeletons while singing “He who would valiant be…”