I eventually dragged the boot towards me with the help of a sodden stick. While this path sees far fewer pilgrims than the Camino's more-popular Camino Frances and Camino Portugues routes, new signposting, OS mapping and a network of pubs and churches offering stamps aim to revive England's lost pilgrimage culture. I was walking the newly waymarked St James Way, a 68.5-mile trail from Reading – the seat of St James in medieval England – to Southampton, where medieval English pilgrims would have set sail for Spain to begin the so-called Camino Ingles from Ferrol or A Coruña to Santiago de Compostela. The Camino's growing popularity has encouraged the revival of pilgrimage routes across Europe in recent years, the latest of which is in south-east England. After two years of pandemic restrictions, 2023 is expected to be the Camino's busiest year yet. But it wasn't until 2019 – when a record-breaking 347,585 people hiked the Camino – that pilgrim numbers approached those of the medieval period, when 500,000 people walked the Camino every year. The elongated scallop shell at the end of my road pointed north to Galicia, leading pilgrims across the Iberian peninsula to Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of St James the Apostle are said to be buried in the city's 10th-Century cathedral.Ī network of medieval routes across Spain, France and Portugal, the Camino de Santiago grew in popularity after the Galician priest Father Elías Valiña Sampedro marked the route with yellow arrows in the 1980s. Between the ages of three and 10, I lived in what was then a small dirt-road village on the south-east coast of Spain. I was a just child when I saw my first Camino sign. But then I saw something ahead that urged me to continue: a yellow scallop shell on a blue roundel. With rain seeping through my jacket and my hiking boot lost to a cabbage field, I wanted to give up. At first, I thought they were laughing at my failed attempts to escape the mud, but it soon dawned on me that I looked like a drowned field mouse, and they were likely eyeing me for dinner. In the sky, two red kites circled above me, letting out high-pitched whistles between swoops. Walking through flooded English farmland during one of the wettest Marches on record, I'd slipped out of my left boot, leaving me balancing on one foot over a muddy puddle that was big enough to bathe in. It was a stormy afternoon and I was stuck in a cabbage field in rural Berkshire. I retreated back to my one-legged scarecrow, unsure of what to do next. I turned my head in slow motion to look for my shoe over my right shoulder, which made my standing leg and arms flail like an inflatable tube man. The Rock of Cashel is one of Ireland’s most spectacular and – deservedly – most visited tourist attractions.I was balancing on one leg, arms outstretched like a scarecrow. Cormac’s Chapel, for example, contains the only surviving Romanesque frescoes in Ireland. In 1101 the site was granted to the church and Cashel swiftly rose to prominence as one of the most significant centres of ecclesiastical power in the country. Brian Boru was crowned High King at Cashel in 978 and made it his capital. Patrick himself came here to convert King Aenghus to Christianity. Originally the seat of the kings of Munster, according to legend St. Among the monuments to be found there is a round tower, a high cross, a Romanesque chapel, a Gothic cathedral, an abbey, the Hall of the Vicars Choral and a fifteenth-century Tower House. Set on a dramatic outcrop of limestone in the Golden Vale, the Rock of Cashel, iconic in its historic significance, possesses the most impressive cluster of medieval buildings in Ireland.
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