On a clifftop outside Whitby, six people gather in the hope of finding spiritual connections and even enlightenment. For now, they have little in common other than a public profile.
Together they’ll walk a winding route around England’s top right-hand corner, travelling through North Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland before arriving at Holy Island, long known as Lindisfarne, where the seventh-century St Cuthbert was bishop.
“I’m a control freak,” she says later, when we gather after a screening of the opening episode. “I like to know exactly what I’m doing and at exactly what time I do it. But you have to surrender to these experiences and that’s what I did. I found that first day hard, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Keep walking.’ And the landscape is just so beautiful.”
This is the eighth series of Pilgrimage, an achievement which will be marked when Pilgrimage is given a special Trustees’ Award at the Sandford Saint Martin Awards at Lambeth Palace in June. As the freshly installed Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent journey on foot to her new cathedral illustrated, many of us desire a different, more contemplative, way of travelling.
Every step taken is through what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Whitby Abbey, the romantic gothic ruin where the party make their first stop, was home in the seventh century to a monastic community under the rule of St Hild. She established Whitby as a seat of Christian learning, and is said to have turned snakes to stone, which is why local ammonite fossils are called snake stones. “I find Hild and those times fascinating,” says Norris. “And you can still feel it in that part of the world; the power is there.”
The BBC pilgrims set off in different states of belief. Kensit says she is an “à la carte Catholic”; picking the parts of her childhood faith that bring her most comfort. Norris, brought up in the Church of England, finds the divine in the things around her. Al-Habib is an observant Muslim and Banjo a committed Christian. Ghouri describes herself as atheist, Middlemiss has sought prayer retreats in Indian ashrams, and Blaker performs funny sketches about his fixation with becoming the perfect Orthodox Jew.
“The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful. My life was plucked out and this character was invented that was meant to be me. Actually, it was nothing like me and never was.” Kensit has learnt certain truths the hard way. “You don’t have to marry all your boyfriends,” she says. It’s advice she also offers to Ghouri in the show.
Norris travels with her own burden. In the first episode it’s revealed she experienced a tragedy early in life. “Somebody very close to me took their own life when I was younger. It had a profound effect on me.” Did it affect her faith? “Everyone says when somebody dies, ‘Time is a great healer’ or ‘They’re at peace now.’ Culturally, I was raised a Christian, but back then suicide was taboo. If you’d taken your own life, Christianity’s response was, ‘You’re going down there.’”
“There is so much in the Catholic Church that I believe in but also aspects I didn’t agree with. So, I opened up to other things like meditation. You hear that word and think, ‘Ohm, ohm,’ and that you have to do yoga and be able to put your legs behind your head. But prayer can be mediation.”
“It was a blessing to be with these people that are so open-minded and eager to learn,” he says, and in turn, he learnt about his fellow pilgrims. One morning in the Durham hills he took a picture of the Jewish Blaker quietly considering a religious text. “Ashley was reading it but he was also, I thought, centring himself; saying this is who I am, this is what I believe in.”
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