Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome by Harry Bucknall
| Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome by Harry Bucknall | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: While not breaking new ground as regards travel journalism, this book does at least take us on a way through Western Europe very few have thought to tread. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 256 | Date: July 2014 |
| Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum | |
| ISBN: 9781408187241 | |
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What links London and Rome? Their capital city status for one, of course. One has a St Paul's cathedral, the other a St Peter's (although pedants will say not). They both have a football team who wear red and white. Oh, and the ancient pilgrim route called the Via Francigena – although the pedant will again say that that strictly starts at that other pilgrimage site, Canterbury. As for Harry Bucknall, the Via starts at St Paul's and should end at St Peter's. Whether or not Harry himself will connect the two cities – and entirely on foot – is the subject of this travel book.
It's not an undertaking many of us would relish. Going solo all that way requires a large amount of stamina and determination. Once you've walked to Dover and taken the ferry you're just days into a journey of several months. Walk down to south-east France and you're halfway – when you're also up in the mountain passes that you need to get you through Switzerland.
Although the point of this book is partly that you're not on your own. Ignoring the author's background, which allows him to rustle up some ex-military colleagues of his here and there to put him up, and a few passing Counts with castles in which to entertain him, he can rely on a network of pilgrim hostelries. The route has been known of for centuries, and over those many years the regular places to stay have been made semi-official, and are now a network of (mainly religious) buildings where the pilgrims get their 'passport' stamped as confirmation of their on-going perambulation and a cheap bed and board. Certainly, too, when closing on the target you get to see more people who are doing the same, from around the world, either in one fell swoop or as circumstances allow them. In the old days, of course, the pilgrim would be absolved of all their sins in the Vatican, and turn round and walk back home, so the path as you would expect has a few ghosts along its route.
It does smack quite a lot of what I've read of the route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain – the same hostelries with rough and ready dorms and rough and ready walking companions, the same early starts and mid-afternoon collapses with sore feet and a cold one. This book is definitely aware of this – certainly Bucknall meets someone who is on the walk with him yet dines out on doing El Camino in Spain to this day. But Bucknall doesn't try to deflect too much from his own journey just because other walks are available. He learns the individual merits of one's own passage along the Via, and gets to compare and contrast it with a universal kindness formed from being in, or just helping out those in, the same small band of travellers.
Bucknall in fact doesn't try, or manage, to put much artifice on his writing at all. It's not a desperately short book, nor long (unlike the route taken), so he finds occasion to talk about his painful feet only once or twice, whereas other walking writers can gross you out with detail at times. He doesn't put too large a spin on the way the walk finishes, whereas others can pad their diary notes out with attempts at meaningfulness that go on for pages. With a balanced plod through the miles (all 1,411 of them) no section of the route gets more or less attention than any other, and all the towns and people he meets get an equal representation. He is a little clunky at trying to accurately report spoken monologues of his hosts, presumably given in French, in their own unique style of speech, but for the main this seems a very honest account. It's not overly religious, despite the prayers said here, there and everywhere and the nature of the places he visits; it's not the most graphically descriptive writing out but it does convey the entire experience of taking the walk. So much so that, when you note from the maps that the path continues through Rome and out the other side to Jerusalem you do kind of hope the author's up to the challenge…
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Walking Home by Simon Armitage shows the author gaining his own self-supporting network courtesy of social media. My favourite recent travel read remains Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome by Harry Bucknall at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Like a Tramp, Like A Pilgrim: On Foot, Across Europe to Rome by Harry Bucknall at Amazon.com.
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