Footsteps in sacred time

Walking the Via Francigena

Was it the trespassing man on the tracks at St Pancras, or the angry herd of nursing cows, or braying crowds belting out Oasis that led me to believe that there were other forces at play? That for me to walk alone from Canterbury to Dover and not expect anything to happen to me, was hubris, especially on this walk. This trail, this holy trail.

However I might like to believe there is nothing much ever at work than the random events of the world playing off each other, I did get the sense that if I was to walk from Canterbury to Dover (around 32km) it would make sense to start early.

Except, I didn't and I started late.

I didn't get to Canterbury Cathedral until close to 3pm, and it meant I had to make quick work of this behemoth. After paying through the nose for entry, I orbited myself around the place at swift pace and tried to locate the thing that I actually wanted to see: the pilgrim trail marker.

It took me 2 tries around the Cathedral to find it. It's pretty innocuous. Just a slab really. But I knew that this thing marked the start of a 1,000 kilometre journey. A trail that runs from the South east of England, to the northern beaches of France through its entirety, to the Swiss and Italian alps, lacing itself through the Po valley into Italy and finally to Rome.

Via Francigena.

It has a long and wild history. What I love about it is that there is no definitive trail. It never existed in permanence. It was constantly in motion, moving around, snaking, twisting over the millennia. And although much of it is asphalt, stone and wood, this is just the current iteration. It’s an idea as much as anything real. A thread woven between the European lands.

I wanted to walk it because it is there.

I had supposed there was something special about walking a route that had been religiously walked for hundreds of years. But once I learned that the via Francigena was also one of the main arteries of transit for trade across Europe during the medival periods, it just took on an added dimension. It is an economic and cultural artery as much as a religious path.

What is so good about this trail is there is almost nothing there to say it’s there: It's not a majestic Cathedral. Or an ornate town square. Or beautiful sculpture. It's just a dusty road.

The ancient Romans had a phrase: Solvitur ambulando: it is solved by walking. On pilgrim trails like this one, that solving happens in layers.

Each footfall connects you to centuries of seekers who came before, when Europe was bound together by faith and footpaths rather than politics and passports. Post-Brexit, I think there's something quietly radical about following these ancient arteries that stitch Britain to the continent, as if to commit that our connections transcend our modern borders.

There's a strange doubling of time that happens when you walk an ancient pilgrim route too. Each step exists simultaneously in your immediate present - the burn in your legs, the sweat on your back, the particular angle of afternoon light - and also in a kind of eternal present that stretches back through the ages. Your feet touch the same terroir that countless others have touched. You are intensely here, now, in your body, while also being everywhere and everywhen that this path has ever been.

Like a river that's never the same water but always the same river, the trail exists in a perpetual present moment that somehow contains all its past moments. When you walk it, you step into this river of time. Your particular journey - your blisters, your revelations, your mundane miracle of forward motion - becomes part of that greater flow. Every step you take is uniquely yours, never before taken in quite this way, and yet it's also an echo of millions of steps taken before. You're doing something larger than yourself precisely by doing something as small and present as putting one foot in front of the other.

Walking became a form of prayer here. Which is saying something as a non-religious person, but it felt true. The rhythm of feet against earth creates a meditation space felt like a sort of communion. Like those medieval pilgrims who walked these paths acutely aware of their mortality - facing plague, bandits, and harsh conditions - I faced my own fragility. Death and life intertwine along the route - ancient graves and memorials stand alongside wild flowers and new growth. For me, each step became both a meditation on eternity and the present.

The early pilgrims who walked this path might have been seeking absolution, or adventure, or simple forward progress. They walked through their own present moments, faced their own doubts, nursed their own blisters. Now their present moments have become part of the path's eternal present, just as my steps will become part of that same eternal movement. The trail teaches you to be fully in your moment while holding the awareness that your moment is just one bead on an endless string of moments.

This is perhaps why pilgrim routes have such power to transform - they force us to exist simultaneously in multiple timeframes. We are both the brief, mortal creature feeling each step, and the eternal walker whose feet have worn these paths for a thousand years. We are both the individual seeking our own truth, and part of humanity's longer seeking. The destination, whether Rome or redemption, matters less than this stretching of the self across time, this paradoxical experience of being intensely present while touching the eternal.

The greatest paradox of pilgrimage is that the destination barely matters. In fact, I only walked the shortest part of the continental trail. It was never just about reaching Rome or Jerusalem - it was about the transformation that occurred through sustained, intentional movement. My destination provided structure, but the real journey was internal. Time moved differently - I learned to measure it in footsteps rather than minutes. The urgent need to "arrive" somewhere dissolved into a deeper appreciation for the simple act of being in motion.

The real pilgrimage happened in the quiet moments between landmarks - in dusty paths rather than grand cathedrals, in chance encounters rather than planned arrivals, in the mundane miracle of putting one foot in front of the other for days on end. I was simultaneously insignificant and part of something eternal, a brief link in an endless chain of seekers who have found their way forward, one step at a time.

Have you walked any other sections of the Via Francigena? Is there somewhere we should all walk before we die?

Let us know in the comments!