In response to my last post, a wise reader suggested that one ought not to compare lovers. VF is your new companion, she said, ‘give it time, let it grow on you’ – something like that.

Armed with good advice and back on track in Wisques, we have averaged about 20 kms a day over the last 3 days to Bruay-la-Buissiere. No one claims that these sections of the VF in Northern France are especially handsome. But we met some wonderful fellow-walkers in Wisques and somehow time and season have fallen into place, making the days pleasant.

The path here passes through suburbs, manicured parklands, farms and patches of woodland. Spring has started garlanding the ground with sprays of yellow and white and sprinkles of blue and pink (too tiny for my camera) so that even the grey tarmac roads which are hard on your feet, are gentle on the eye. In the new holiday suburbs, it is the upstart tulips and trees grafted by human hands that demand attention.

My sharp-eyed companion has spied several rabbits, one hare and even I could see the three deers darting along a ridge above our path. A big bird, something like a pheasant, clattered right into us, surprising all involved,

For days now, the clouds have held sway over the sky. The sun is soft when it winks out for brief intervals. The wind is silent one day and playful the next. Dire predictions of rain and storm from my pessimistic weather app have not come to pass.

But it is not always pretty – what relationship is? Northern France was devastated by two world wars. Already I have seen more grave yards and war memorials than I can remember anywhere else.

In an area where coal was key to post-war recovery, the detritus of mining, closed down late last century, is part of the landscape. The tyre-churned boggy paths in the woodlands are tedious to walk through. And we have days, perhaps two weeks ahead of us, of walking on sealed roads, designed for cars, not foot-fall.

So yes, I am still apprehensive. But in the parks and the less curated woods, spring is in the air and bird-calls compete with, and occasionally drown out the sound of electric saws on one side and cars on the other.

With a little help from good weather, the VF has been a considerate companion, showing us bits of modern rural France, that are rarely captured through car windows, and never found on must-do tourist lists.

So for the moment we are staying the course with all the hopes and fears of travellers on a road less travelled.

If this was an academic essay, I would start thus: there is so much inefficiency in the bipedal mode of transport in the modern era, that the author now believes walking to be a fool’s errand! But doubts are part of the course on any long journey, so let me start at the start.

In France the Via Francigena starts at Notre Dame in the centre of the port city of Calais. From here you walk towards the coast, across the canal, then ramble through a bit of suburbia to a concrete promenade which hovers over the beach following the coast line pretty much all the way to Wissant.

The coastal route GR 120, with its startling views of the ‘white cliffs of Dover’ across the channel on a clear day, is as comfortable as hiking gets – flat and with photo opportunities galore.

GR 145, which cuts back from the coast line, before re-joining it at the Dover Patrol Monument, is slightly longer and a tad uphill. So I grumble when my meticulous Walking Buddy insists on taking the official VF. Doesn’t he know all roads lead to Rome? On the other hand, this venture is all about the road, and not at all about Rome, I am eventually forced to concede.

Despite that small Hill Difficulty (which I mention only to show off my familiarity with the English classic Pilgrim’s Progress and not to impugn my Walking Buddy, who happens to belong to a certain Hill clan), the day is as good as walking gets, easy and beautiful.

Wissant is a lovely little sea-side resort, with a Friday night market in the village square, selling local produce. Someone has decked out the church with the little white blossoms we have been admiring along the way.

The walk into Wissant, and even more the way out of it to Guines, is marked with remnants of war, both medieval and modern, some memorialised officially and others turned into sites for protest.

Day 2, the walk to Guines, starts with the anticipation of meeting Micheline at Mont du Couple, making real a Facebook virtual friendship. The track is uninspiring, but not unpleasant.

At Landrethun-le-Nord, after farewelling Micheline, we go against her advice and the official VF to follow an alternative map which seems to be more direct, though with some sections on a D road. Our final 4 kms into Guines, turn out to be on the edges of a highway with cars screaming past every minute.

Perhaps there is a benefit in the getting of self-knowledge: I HATE walking where cars abound but I never again wish to pay with my fragile sanity for confirmation of this knowledge😑

Information from other pilgrims that the official VF path into Guines is uninspiring only adds to my anxiety. Just four days into the walk, the VF is wearying, different, alien. It’s not like the South West Coast Path in UK, which I remember as exciting and challenging. Unlike the Camino, the folks in track towns don’t cheer the walkers on. So what will keep me walking this road, I wonder.

We decide to go off the track for a couple of days to Saint-Omer, to see one of Europe’s oldest libraries. A free bus takes us back to Calais in 35 minutes – the distance that we covered on foot in two days, and which cost us two nights of accommodation and food. Then a half hour in the train and we are in Saint-Omer.

Walking seems completely illogical in a place where transport is easy, cheap and even from an environmental point of view, the marginal cost in greenhouse gas-generating fuel per passenger, is negligible.

Saint-Omer is a sweet old town, with gourmet eateries and historic monuments. It would be so easy to stay for a bit, then move to some place where curated tourist fodder is more readily at hand.

But for now, we are committed to getting back on track tomorrow, a very short walk into Wisques will bring us back to the Via Francigena.

When in doubt the Believers turn to God. For Bengalis there is always রবি ঠাকুর (Tagore to the rest of the world, but almost a deity to us).

“ওগো পায়ে চলার পথ, অনেক কালের অনেক কথাকে তোমার ধূলিবন্ধনে বেঁধে নীরব করে রেখো না। আমি তোমার ধুলোয় কান পেতে আছি, আমাকে কানে কানে বলো।” ‘Dear walking path, all the stories you have gathered through the ages, don’t keep them quietly secured in your dust cover. I have my ears pressed to your dust, whisper them to me.’

Let’s start with weather: in a word… English…

No. Let us start by counting our blessings. First, conveniently for those hikers who are built for comfort rather than speed, the walk from Canterbury to the coast is easily broken into two bite-sized pieces, about 17 kilometres to Shepherdswell, and a similar distance into Dover. And my prescient Walking Buddy had booked us into the only available accommodation in Shepherdswell.

Secondly, almost miraculously, we had barely taken two hesitant steps into our first day’s walk when we ran into four other walkers, two of them headed, like us, as far as they can get, in the time permitted on their visas!

So, for most of Day 1, we walked as a group of seven, including three doctors – very reassuring in case one slipped in the despondent slough and broke a leg or something! By the end of the first hour we had forgotten the rain and were chatting like old friends, finding common ground and even common friends in unexpected places.

The world is getting smaller, and perhaps the VF is no longer such a lonely walk as most of the books and blogs of yesteryears suggest.

From Canterbury, the VF is well sign-posted, if you can ignore the persistent indeterminacy of the road’s length. St.Augustine’s Abbey, just a few hundred meters from Canterbury Cathedral calculates the distance as 1800 kilometres.

A kilometre or so further along the road at St. Martin’s church, the distance has increased by a whole 100 kilometres!

Mileposts on the walk from Shepherdswell to Dover are also anarchic, showing ‘3 miles to Dover’ at three successive cross-roads a kilometre or two apart. An American day-walker overtaking us at the third 3-mile post, caught the dismay on my face and helpfully suggestd: ‘Three miles thrice? Oh, that just means not-long-to-go-now.’

Outside of the towns the path winds through farms and forests, sodden, squelchy and muddy, sometimes completely obscured, except for a distant fence that somehow manages to guide your steps to the next turn.

The weather made me think about difference between day walks and long distance hiking. Had I been planning for a little day ramble on Easter Monday, I would have consulted my weather app, stayed home and eaten the remaining Easter eggs.

It rained pretty much non-stop for the first three hours of our first day’s walk while gusty winds played havoc with ponchos and hats. But when you walk day after day, week after week, and indeed on the VF, month after month, you can’t really expect sunshine and clear skies and temperature regulated precisely to your walking preferences, every day. In the time it takes to walk 2000 kms, the seasons turn over, you move from the coast to the snowy mountains. Once the course is set, you walk whatever the season or the terrain. And if you have good company to distract you with lively conversation, that is what you remember rather than the muddy boots and dung-splattered pants.

Just for the record: the sun was shining on Day 2, making for a pleasant, mostly uneventful walk into Dover, made memorable by the company of fellow-travellers.

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!