Walking the Way<\/p>\n
Guidebooks usually say St. Michael\u2019s Way is 12.5 miles long. Some admit that you have to make some of it up as you go along, though, so the dimensions might better be considered variable. There isn\u2019t absolute agreement about where it should begin, either, but St Uny Church, Lelant, seems the most appropriate. Even the end is open to interpretation. The British Pilgrimage Trust suggests a small chapel on the island of St Michael\u2019s Mount as a conclusion, tide and time permitting (it is only possible to walk from the beach to the island at low tide); it also confirms the potential satisfactions of alternative endings.<\/p>\n
Pilgrimage is archaic business under any circumstances, but St Michael\u2019s Way is really stubborn about it. Ostensibly a medieval pilgrimage route running across Cornwall from north to south, it is intractably at odds contemporary travel patterns. The travellers who first established the route were trying to get from Ireland or Wales to pilgrimage sites in France or Spain\u2014specifically Santiago de Compostela\u2014where the bones of St. James are said to rest. Walking straight across Cornwall north to south made sense. It made their overall journey both shorter and safer. Now, most traffic in the county flows east and west \u2013 life itself seems to flow east and west. St. Michael\u2019s Way does not, and so people who walk it tend to wind up doing peculiar things, such as ignoring perfectly serviceable lanes and walking over unmarked fields at skew angles, or searching for pilgrimage route signs in a bit of ostensibly godless suburban development, or checking the horizon for steeples and spires in the age of GPS. You begin to feel as though insisting on\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0route is a bit perverse.<\/p>\n I walked the Way one bright, clear, cool day in May. What I had thought would take about three hours turned out to need more than five. From the Lelant Village station \u2014 a request stop in contrast to the bigger, more functional station at Lelant Saltings \u2014 it is just a few minutes\u2019 walk to St Uny. From this medieval stone survivor, settled in an open landscape on cliffs above the sea, the Way follows the coastal path along the Hayle estuary, occasionally dipping down to the beach from the cliffs, to Carbis Bay. Then it turns rather abruptly inland, almost due south, rising steeply at first, crossing one busy road, doubling up with village footpaths, running through unmarked woodland and newly-built housing. After hours of walking, it was almost a surprise to reach the top of Trencrom Hill. Here you catch your first glimpse of the destination, the point called, in the traditional language of pilgrimage, \u201cMt Joy\u201d.<\/p>\n From here, in fact, the whole Way is roughly visible, the north coast at your back, and the south coast \u2013 Merazion with the iconic profile of St Michael\u2019s Mount\u2014ahead. Exhilaration notwithstanding, however, a hungry pilgrim who has not brought lunch must soon start down the hill in a focussed quest for food, the only commercial possibility being the White Hart pub in Ludgevan. The last part of the Way threads among private properties and through photogenic woodland toward the A39, the main road into Penzance. It crosses that, as well as the Marazion Marshes, famously attractive to birds and to scores of their lens-laden admirers. It crosses the main railway line from Penzance to London, too. In principle, the Way then proceeds to the chapel on the island of St Michael\u2019s Mount. Alternative endings feature beach and sky, the cry of gulls and the English Channel.<\/p>\n Clearly the Way has a distinct physical shape: it begins with a walk from the sea cliffs to the beach, climbs to one of the highest vantage points in the county, descends more or less symmetrically to sea level, and concludes\u2014in some ways returns\u2014to another beach, another church, and another perspective. It has the shape of a story. Guidebooks, maps and descriptions tend to reinforce this sense of coherence by listing and discussing the buildings, wells, crosses, monuments \u2014 even the pub \u2014 in the order they are found en route. The effect is to quietly homogenize the diverse references. And they are spectacularly diverse, exceeding the bounds of both \u201cpilgrimage\u201d and even \u201croute\u201d. There are oral tales of giants and gods, legends of lands long submerged in the sea, smooth ties of language and migration linking Wales to Cornwall and in turn to Brittany, the slow, eventful conversion to Christianity, the advent of literacy, an absolutely astonishing roster of saints, the area\u2019s very early sense of identity, and its persistent, angry resistance to efforts to compromise its identity in dozens of ways. Walking along, reading a guide, moving at a steady pace and not dwelling on any one point, you tend to look past the contradictions, the impossibilities. You let the solemnity and remote quality of the term \u201cpilgrimage route\u201d bridge over things that don\u2019t make a great deal of sense.<\/p>\n Who actually walked the Way? Were they pilgrims or missionaries? Could some of them have been traders? Migrants? Was this really the way they walked? The fort on Trencrom Hill was in use before Christ was born \u2013 well before there could have been any pilgrims going to Santiago. Long before there was any writing \u2014 anywhere \u2014 people told each other stories of giants playing games with huge boulders, tossing them with sporting precision between the heights of Trencrom and those of St Michael\u2019s Mount, an island that incidentally could not yet have had that name. The oldest part of St Uny church at Lelant apparently dates from around 1100, the same time pilgrimages, with all the trappings of relics and indulgences that have come down to us by way of Chaucer\u2019s\u00a0Canterbury Tales<\/em>, were starting to be fashionable. But there\u2019s no suggestion of the opulence or intricate social stratification of the\u00a0Tales<\/em>\u00a0along this Cornish Way. And St Uny himself lived in the 6th century. That\u2019s a 500-year difference! This monk \u2013 often said to be Irish, but more probably Welsh \u2014 couldn\u2019t exactly have been a pilgrim anyway: you can\u2019t be rushing off to honour the bones of St James in Spain and Christianising Cornishmen at the same time, particularly while ministering to the three different parishes he is said to have founded in Cornwall. The so-called Age of Pilgrimage \u2013 when travel to such luminous destinations as Santiago de Compostela was really was all the rage \u2013 is usually dated to 1100-1500. So although there is a satisfying church-to-church symmetry in declaring a chapel on St Michael\u2019s Mount to be the conclusion of St Michael\u2019s Way, there could have been no chapel on the island until well into the 17th<\/sup>\u00a0century. Pilgrims who travelled much earlier would surely have finished the Cornish leg of their journey at the harbour on the other side of the island in any case, a few steps closer to their respective European destinations.<\/p>\n On St Michael\u2019s Way, notable objects appear in a linear order. They must be visited in that order and, crucially, on foot. Chaucer\u2019s pilgrims apparently rode horses, and today visitors to the Shrine of St James in Spain often ride bicycles. But St Michaels Way \u2013 with its mud and rocky hills and stone stiles \u2014 must be walked. For the Way comes into its own only by walking, measuring the distances in footfalls, acting on hunches, in not always knowing what comes next. Only in climbing and resting, doubting and testing does the shape of the Way become recognizable as the shape of a story. It is not a story specifically about Cornwall or Christianity, although it touches both. It doesn\u2019t have the fixed features of a romance or a quest, a tragedy or a comedy. It is the thread you yourself pull through a dense texture of stories: some you cross, some you follow, challenge or elaborate. In the end you have a story of your own.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Walking the Way Guidebooks usually say St. Michael\u2019s Way is 12.5 miles long. 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