What makes a place sacred, and can you find spiritual transformation without traveling thousands of miles? Why do ordinary English villages and Scottish islands continue to draw seekers from around the world? Award-winning travel writer Oliver Smith talks about British pilgrimage sites from Lindisfarne to Iona, and Walsingham to Glastonbury, and how these ancient places still draw even secular pilgrims today.
Oliver Smith is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and
On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain.
The double lives of pilgrimage places, and how ordinary locations can offer transcendent experiences
Lindisfarne’s tidal causeway
The tension between commercial tourism and genuine spiritual seeking at sacred sites
Iona’s remote Scottish island setting and the challenging journey required to reach it
Walsingham’s remarkable history from medieval powerhouse to modern multicultural pilgrimage destination
* Why Glastonbury might be Britain’s best pilgrimage
The philosophy of traveling deeper not further, and finding extraordinary meaning in familiar places
You can find Oli at
OliverSmithTravel.com
You can find more
Pilgrimage Resources here, as well as my book,
Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.
Transcript of the interview
Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Oliver Smith. Hi Oli.
Oli: Hello, how are you doing?
Jo: Oh, it’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Oli is a multi award-winning travel writer and author of The Atlas of Abandoned Places, and On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain, which we are talking about today. It’s a fantastic book.
Now, Oli, I wanted to get straight into it. So you say in the book, although you’ve traveled all over the world, you say quote from the book,
“What interested me now were those places that promised a kind of travel beyond what could be charted on an ink or pixel map.”
So I wondered if you could start with that, because you’ve been to all these tick list travel places. What about those that are these soulful journeys?
Oli: I guess what really interests me is that a lot of these places that feature in the book, they sort of live double lives, you know?
If I pick one at random, or one near where you are in the country. If we think about Glastonbury for example, it’s fascinating because people go there with such huge expectation. For some people it’s a place that unlocks other worlds to them. The tor might be a portal to some world of the fairies or some world of Arthurian legend, or it might be something to do with Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus Christ walking in Somerset and that old legend, you know, so much is invested in it.
Yet at the same time, Glastonbury is a place where if you go to the high street, there’s a Boots. There is a pub selling the usual repertoire of lagers and warm beers and Nobby’s Nuts behind the bar, you know, these places. I think all of them, to some degree in the book, they are ordinary, mundane places that people live in and people pass by every day.
But then they offer, they promise a kind of an extra level, which is detectable to some people and isn’t to others. So it is that kind of duality. I think what really interested me when I was writing this book.
Jo: Yeah, and I guess, well it’s almost a bigger question because when you look at your career as a travel writer and you mentioned their expectation,
