Romantic writers such as Hilaire Belloc were eager to follow this up and they succeeded in creating "a fable of.modern origin" to explain the existence of the Way. While acknowledging that the route was "little studied" and that "very many persons in the neighbourhood had not been aware of it", he nonetheless caused the name to be inserted on the Ordnance Survey map, giving official sanction to his conjecture. Ĭonversely, the concept of a single route called the Pilgrims' Way could be no older than the Victorian Ordnance Survey map of Surrey, whose surveyor, Edward Renouard James, published a pamphlet in 1871 entitled Notes on the Pilgrims' Way in West Surrey. A separate (and more reliably attested) route to Canterbury from London was by way of Watling Street, as followed by the storytellers in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The numbers making their way to Canterbury by this route were not recorded, but the estimate by the Kentish historian William Coles Finch that it carried more than 100,000 pilgrims a year is surely an exaggeration a more prosaic estimate-extrapolated from the records of pilgrims' offerings at the shrine-contends an annual figure closer to 1,000. Travellers from Winchester to Canterbury naturally used the ancient way, as it was the direct route, and research by local historians has provided much by way of detail-sometimes embellished-of the pilgrims' journeys. It is "widely accepted" that this was the route taken by Henry II on his pilgrimage of atonement for the death of Bishop Thomas, from France to Canterbury in July 1174, although this has been disputed and some evidence points to his having taken a route via London. Winchester, apart from being an ecclesiastical centre in its own right (the shrine of St Swithin), was an important regional focus and an aggregation point for travellers arriving through the seaports on the south coast. įrom Thomas Becket's canonization in 1173, until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, his shrine at Canterbury became the most important in the country, indeed "after Rome.the chief shrine in Christendom", and it drew pilgrims from far and wide. The route was still followed as an artery for through traffic in Roman times, a period of continuous use of more than 3000 years. The way then existed as "broad and ill-defined corridors of movement up to half a mile wide" and not as a single, well-defined track. The prehistoric trackway extended further than the present Way, providing a link from the narrowest part of the English Channel to the important religious complexes of Avebury and Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, where it is known as the Harroway. The trackway ran the entire length of the North Downs, leading to and from Folkestone: the pilgrims would have had to turn away from it, north along the valley of the Great Stour near Chilham, to reach Canterbury.Ī section of the lower route, eroded into the slope, in Surrey In places a coexisting ridgeway and terrace way can be identified the route followed would have varied with the season, but it would not drop below the upper line of cultivation. The course was dictated by the natural geography: it took advantage of the contours, avoided the sticky clay of the land below but also the thinner, overlying "clay with flints" of the summits. The prehistoric route followed the "natural causeway" east to west on the southern slopes of the North Downs. This name, of comparatively recent coinage, is applied to a pre-existing ancient trackway dated by archaeological finds to 600–450 BC, but probably in existence since the Stone Age. The Pilgrims' Way (also Pilgrim's Way or Pilgrims Way) is the historical route supposedly taken by pilgrims from Winchester in Hampshire, England, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in Kent. Hiking, cycling and byway former pilgrim way Shrine of Thomas Becket, Canterbury, Kent
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