The enduring power of pilgrimage

Pilgrimage is having a moment. Even as census results suggest a declining commitment to Christianity in the UK, ancient pilgrimage routes are seeing a renaissance. At Westminster Abbey, the annual Edwardtide pilgrimage to the Shrine of St Edward the Confessor draws 500 people, and many more across the five-day celebration of the king and saint.

But pilgrimage to the shrine is not exclusive to the annual gathering, or even to the physical confines of the building. In 2024, a ‘digital pilgrimage’ was launched on the Abbey’s website, which – with images, poems, prayers and imaginative description – leads you, the pilgrim, from the Great West Door through the quire and into the shrine.  

A physical pilgrimage to the Abbey needn’t involve an arduous trek. The co-founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust, Dr Guy Hayward, has made numerous ‘nanopilgrimages’ to the Abbey, walking half an hour or less from other London churches, the short journey culminating in a service at the Abbey. Evensong is a particular favourite, he says, recommending the walk from nearby Westminster Cathedral to the Abbey for a pilgrimage that, all told, takes little over an hour.

Hayward is passionate about maintaining a broad definition of pilgrimage. ‘I’m against a dogmatic approach’, he explains. The journey just needs to be made with an intention that goes beyond the purely practical. Pilgrimage is a state of mind: a journey made with an openness to transformation, and an end point that is in some way meaningful to the person making the trip.

Such a definition means that, in the words of the Abbey’s Minor Canon and Sacrist, the Reverend Helena Bickley-Percival: ‘There’s a strong argument that a lot of our visitors are pilgrims in one way or another…’ Many visitors come to pay respects to a beloved writer commemorated in Poets’ Corner. The grave of Sir Isaac Newton is particularly popular with visitors, while others are drawn to the Grave of the Unknown Warrior. 

Amidst this array of attractions, the shrine which is located within the Confessor’s Chapel is perhaps less known to the average tourist. A reason might be that, to protect it, it is one of the few parts of the Abbey which is not fully open to visitors. It can be accessed during twice-daily prayer services, verger-guided tours and for Holy Communion every Tuesday morning at 8:00am.

Even if you’ve visited the Abbey several times, it’s possible to never see the shrine, which is located behind the gilded high altar screen. The floor of the chapel is about two metres above the ground level throughout the rest of the building. Rather than making it stand out, this serves to disguise the space, and with so much else catching the eye as you walk clockwise from where the nave meets the north transept, it’s easy to miss the wooden steps that lead up to the shrine. 

Climb the much newer (and much, much longer) wooden staircase to The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, more than 16 metres above the Abbey floor, and the shrine’s position in the heart of this great church is more obvious, as is the extent to which its relative simplicity contrasts with the gilded splendour of much of the rest of the building.

What this bird’s-eye view, familiar to anyone who has watched a major Abbey event on TV, doesn’t capture is the feeling of actually sitting in there, when your eyes are drawn upwards as if by some sort of anti-gravitational force: from the roughly hewn base of St Edward’s tomb to the more ornate upper sections, and then further, in the direction suggested by the gothic arches which taper upwards like tongues of flame, flaring towards the ceiling vaults high above your head. 

Mike Dyer, one of the King’s Almsmen who takes part in the Abbey’s services on Sundays and at major festivals, is a regular at the weekly Communion in the chapel. He wakes up at 5:00am to make the journey to the Abbey. ‘Pilgrimage is not a word I’ve ever used about it, but it’s very appropriate’, he reflects. The shrine holds special significance as a place kept apart from the rest of the Abbey, he says. While tourists mill around, this sanctum at the heart of the building is only entered for prayer. 

Time to reflect 

Twice a day, while the Abbey is open to paying visitors, a short prayer service is held at the shrine, to which all are invited. There are many such reminders to those milling around the space that this is not just a beautiful building of historical significance, but a living, breathing place of worship. Every hour, the Duty Chaplain announces a minute of quiet reflection and prayer. The murmured ‘amen’ that follows is not the confident one that fills the Abbey in one of its regular services but is perhaps more powerful for it. 

Like a group of pilgrims who met on the road, the four of us who attended shrine prayers that afternoon were a motley bunch, brought together for a short time before being dispersed back into the world, or in this case into the gentle hubbub of the Abbey at peak visiting time. 

Attendance at the 8:00am service is limited to 25, due to the size of the chapel, so it is advisable to arrive early. For Gabriel Colombo, the service was something of a coda to a longer pilgrimage he had undertaken over the course of the previous week, from Southwark to Canterbury Cathedral. 

He was returning to the US that afternoon, and the pilgrimage had been a time of preparation as he embarked on the longer journey of training for the priesthood. From back in Boston, he told me that he’d brought the experiences of his pilgrimage with him to the shrine that morning. He reflected on how powerful it was to pray in a place where, for close to 1,000 years, Christians have venerated St Edward. 

The Chaucer window 

For almost 80 years, the most famous chronicler of English pilgrimage, Geoffrey Chaucer, was commemorated in a stained-glass window in the Abbey. It illustrated scenes from The Canterbury Tales and was installed in 1868 above the monument to Chaucer in Poets’ Corner. The window was destroyed, however, during the Blitz as a result of a nearby blast. No fragments of the original glass have survived. 

The Abbey’s collection holds a cartoon of one of the panels which gives a sense of how the window, designed by JG Waller, would have appeared: a procession of elegantly drawn scenes from the Tales, the medieval characters depicted with the detail and idealism characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. 

Chaucer lived beside the Abbey for the final year of his life and was the first notable writer to be buried in what would come to be known as Poets’ Corner. The window was, for some decades, a further testament to his stature in the history of literature. Even though the window is no more, the undimmed popularity of his work speaks to the enduring attraction of pilgrimage. 

Francis Martin is a staff writer for the Church Times and has written about faith and travel for magazines including Kinfolk and The Fence.