Pilgrimage. A review

The gift and its giver are long-established social roles. In this gift several generations of a family were involved. The gift came from my son,  Peter,  who selects his gifts carefully, but the young child Joshua handed over the gift. Three generations of  a family, but on flicking through the book I came across a picture of St  Winefride's Well in Wales, which was my mother's favourite shrine. A fourth generation was therefore a silent presence in the giving. Sad, yet sweet memories were evoked by the gift. But the child who presented it knew them not. Maybe one day he will.

This Father's Day gift was authored by Derry Brabbs, a renowned photographer  who specializes in landscape and heritage photography. The author's style seems to be to let the picture tell the story, so his book is replete with photographs of the architecture that the pilgrims would meet en route. The quality of the photography is superb. It includes images of churches and sometimes of the settlements linked to them. The photographs are of generous size, so the readers" eyes are not strained by small imagery. But also he does not separate a route from its landscape, so sometimes the imagery gives us views of the scenery that the pilgrims to see in the flesh what they have just seen as a picture.

The book contains short but concise passages of writing. There is no personal biography in these passages, the book is third person non fiction, but it is well focused on the writing. The passages of prose are lucid and informative and they are economical in their use of words. You never fall into boredom reading these passages.   The book contains maps of the areas through which the pilgrims will travel. But they are generally old maps, accurate as drawn by modern cartographers, but not state of the art modernity. They provide a quaint character to the book.

Brabbs starts from the near, the local pilgrimage sites in Britain and Northern France. He concentrates on mainly southern Britain, though there is a mention of the Welsh pilgrim destinatio Melrose Abbey. Later on he does a section on Mont St Michel in Normandy. Melrose Abbey finds a place in the story of St Cuthbert, Northern Britain's very own saint, whose body which remained uncorrupted after death, was regarded as a miracle well worth recording and a testimony to his sanctity. n, St Winefride's Well, a pilgrim destination that survived Reformation. But there is no mention of the Scottish site Iona. But Scotland is mentioned early in the book when the author does a piece on

St Winefride's Well was a Celtic sacred site associated with the story of St Winefride, whose legend contains the story of her martyrdom and subsequent healing by the power of God channeled through a saint. This well is still an operating pilgrimage site in Northern Wales and England. 

But the great pilgrim site of Canterbury, with its own martyr story of the murdered St Thomas a Becke, was the prime site of England and survived as a pilgrim destination until the Reformation, when England's thug in chief, Henry the Eighth had the shrine looted and vandalized. In later years the shrine has benefited from the revivification of pilgrimage, which has come about as a popular movement in England, with the renewal of old shrines, such as Canterbury and Walsingham, the shrine of Mary the mother of Jesus. Pilgrim sites such as Walsingham do have some architectural value, as some old buildings remain, but they make small fry compared with the architectural glories of the pilgrim ways of the continent, which form much of the visual content of this book. But now for the glories of the great shrines of Europe.

Brabbs concentrates on the architectural glories of the mediaeval shrines of Western Europe, mainly those in France and Spain and Portugal. The bulk of this beautiful volume deals with the pilgrim routes on the European mainland. Inevitably, the fact that pilgrimages have come from a great variety of countries, all with the intention of reaching one of several sites, means that there are different routes across the European mainland, some going to the shrine of St James at Compostella in Spain, whereas other routes, such as the Via Francagena, aim to pass over the Alps to enter Italy to reach the centre of Catholic Christianity in Rome. The author has had to make a selection of pilgrim routes, for just as he had to omit Iona in Scotland, so he has been obliged to omit the modern Marian shrine at Fatima in Portugal, which dates from 1917. 

Brabbs has some of his enforced selection made for him, for he is concentrating on the aesthetics of the pilgrim experience, so he focuses on the art and architecture that the pilgrims meet en route, and thus the readership is treated to a feast of architectural and aesthetic  beauty displayed to us in high quality photography. But  the heavy pressures generated by high quality photography mean that he has to be selective of his material, so not all the routes are photographed in detail. Moreover, he finds a  way to satisfy the readers' desire for beautiful landscape. There are some landscape shots. One of these is on the Via Francagena, which takes a route from France over the Alps via the St Bernard Pass.  This is a lovely landscape.

Most routes tend to pass across France, but there are other countries including Spain, Portugal and parts of western Germany. The German route reaches southwards towards Munich and then joins a route over the Alps. The routes through Spain lead across the Pyrenees and into Spain or sometimes Portugal. The book gives a brief picture of Rome, as if to say that the pilgrim experience is more about travelling to a destination than it is about arriving. 

This is a high quality book that will endow any personal library with an aesthetic blessing. I commend it to readers.

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