The Path You Take: dateline Canterbury

Canterbury has been a premier tourist destination since the middle ages: at its heart one of the most ancient and venerated cathedrals bearing witness to 1500 years of history and mythology of spectacular crimes and redemptions, miracles, arsons, blazes and international diplomacy. (But you have read Murder in the Cathedral, and seen Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton play out the drama between King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket on the big screen). The surrounding town still hosts medieval inns where Chaucer’s somewhat unholy pilgrims would have been entirely at home!

In a place screaming with religious and literary allusions, the official trailhead to Via Francigena (VF) is a modest concrete tablet – located beside the path between the two main entrances to the cathedral.

Nor is it easy to find Sigeric the Serious (my first pilgrim vow is to eschew bad jokes about His Seriousness) whose itinerary from Rome back to Canterbury in 990, forms the basis of the contemporary Via Francigena. Eventually my sharp-eyed Walking Buddy finds him on a wall, amongst the complete list of Canterbury Archbishops – along with 104 others, from the year 594 to the current Primate. (It is hard to get attention when you are competing with successors like Becket, who got his head bashed in by knights, and Cranmer who was burnt at the stake.)

Apparently, travelling to Rome from England was not unusual in Sigeric’s time. Roads to Rome, it seems, were full of English pilgrims and those who robbed them. Four decades earlier, Archbishop Aelfsige (he is also on the list above) had set off to collect his pallium from the Pope and quite literally came to a dead end in the icy Alps in the winter of the year 959.

Sigeric, by contrast, travelled in mid-summer – and with luck and weather on his side, lived to tell the tale. He (or a minion) wrote down his itinerary: a list of the places he passed and possibly stopped for the night. By a further stroke of good luck, the record, which to the untrained eye looks like two pages of scribbles, survived, so that a thousand years later, historians, scientists and tourism promoters were able to re-imagine a 2000 kilometre path, and re-make the Via Francigena, the road through France, into something of an emerging ‘destination’, modelled on Camino Santiago.

But on contemporary maps, at any rate, VF is not so much one road as a general direction heading from Canterbury to Rome, more or less in a straight line. Not only can you connect the sections of Sigeric’s diary via several different paths, there are options to take off on other ancient roads, perhaps not taken by Sigeric, but frequented by other pilgrims, past and present.

Facebook (now the source of all knowledge, of course) tells me that over this Easter weekend, there are pilgrims, tourists and philanthropists starting their VF walk not only from Canterbury, but also from Winchester (further to the north), and Calais (across the water in France). And one could easily set off from some seedy old pub near London Bridge, following in the footsteps of Chaucer’s pilgrims. All of these, and many more villages and towns are equally valid trailheads for this road to Rome.

Despite the straight and narrow Roman roads and Sigeric’s notes and all the hundreds of books and charts and maps that have been laid upon each other over many centuries, there seems still to be a kind of fluidity to this path: there are no precise answers to the question ‘how long is the Via Francigena’ – 1700 kilometres? May be even 2300 kilometres. Somewhere along that long and shifting line you can make your own beginning and end and determine the turns you make.

For those like me, brought up within a Bengali Hindu sensibility, this malleability of the path gives comfort. The most quoted line from our most famous mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa is this: যত মত ততো পথ – there are but as many roads as you can see.

We have located our trailhead. And we have set an end point – the Great St. Bernard’s Pass. In between, we have the footfalls of those who have gone before to guide us. As in life, so on this long walk, even with digital maps and GPS guidance and all the other technological determinations, there will be choices to make and mistakes and missed steps, the fear of getting lost and falling and the excitement of finding the road again. All that is still ahead of us!