When the saints go marching in

With his heart set on ‘pilgrim-ing’ through the Highlands–one of Europe’s most beautiful landscapes–Joe Gibbs retraces St Columba’s footsteps to Iona, little knowing that a bout of norovirus is about to hinder his best-laid plans

- Joe Gibbs

BUT why are they doing it?’ asked Hermione, an aunt, in a Wodehousian sort of way. She had a point. Why indeed? Had any of us stopped to think? On the face of it, the clue was in the word ‘pilgrimage’, suggestive of a lengthy votive journey. However, as to the choice of route and what spirit moved us, it was a fair question to which I had only a partial answer at the outset.

I have twice ridden El Rocio, the great Andalusian pilgrimage by horse, foot and mule cart that converges annually on a village in the Doñana at Pentecost. The Spanish have an enviable habit of making a party of anything. El Rocio is a cocktail of landscape, culture and Catholicism sustained by copious vino. By day, pilgrims sing flamenco hymns and priests kneel before ox-cart-borne silver effigies of the Rocio Virgin. By night, they light fires in gypsy-wagon circles and accompany flamenco with mesmeric palmas clapping.

El Rocio is very different to Spain’s betterknown northern pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which is anchored to no particular date. Solitary and sober by comparison—and international in flavour, where El Rocio is almost exclusively Spanish—the Camino hosts an annual 350,000 pilgrims on its ancient routes that converge on the cathedral resting place of St James the Great in Galicia.