Lying on the piano in Shulbrede Priory, near Haslemere in West Sussex, was the original manuscript of English composer Hubert Parry’s musical setting of William Blake’s famous poem, Jerusalem. One of the “pilgrims� in our little group sat down at the instrument and up rose the opening notes of England’s unofficial national anthem.
I had joined the group for a section of an 11-day journey organised by the British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT), which was formed in 2014 in response to the growing popularity of routes such as the Camino de Santiago, the walk to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, north-west Spain.
This pilgrimage was celebrating the 100th birthday of the famous tune, written in the depths of the first world war. A dedicated group followed the route from Blake’s unmarked grave (there is a memorial stone nearby) in Bunhill Fields, near Old Street in London, to the cottage near Chichester where he was arrested for sedition in 1803, then on to Rustington, where Parry died, and finally Arundel. These long-haul foot travellers were marching to Jerusalem, not literally but musically, visiting places linked to the lives of the poet and the composer.
The 125-mile Blake/Parry itinerary is one of several being arranged by the Trust, whose vision is more secular than sacred. Modern pilgrims can join a guided walk (details at the end of this article) or go self-guided. The trust describes its aims not as re-establishing pilgrimages, but renewing the tradition for modern times, “an open spiritual activity without religious prescription�. As its founders point out, a pursuit once enjoyed by Kings and peasants alike was curtailed when Henry VIII imposed a ban in 1538.
The group I joined for several days towards the end of the Blake/Parry journey was a pioneering one, the equivalent of a maiden voyage, with a lot of good singing en route. This was not surprising given the interests of the walk leaders and co-founders of the trust: Guy Hayward and Will Parsons. The first is a specialist in the formation of community through song; the other is a writer and singer.
Connection was the aim: the kind made between walking/talking companions even before Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales, but also between the present route and the past through which it went. That piano in Shulbrede had once been Parry’s. His daughter Dorothea married Arthur, First Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede – their descendants still live here. It’s a fair bet that he played Jerusalem on this instrument.
From Bunhill Fields, the pilgrimage route heads a couple of miles south-west to Golden Square in Soho, where Blake’s brother had a sock shop and where William exhibited his paintings. Then it’s on to Tate Britain and its Blake Room; Wellington House, HQ of the propaganda bureau that commissioned Parry’s setting of Jerusalem; and the Royal Albert Hall, where only the national anthem has been sung more often than Jerusalem.
Photograph: Alamy
Leaving London for the commuter lands of Surrey, the route takes in Cobham Chapel, for the memorial to the great 19th-century builder Robert McAlpine, or Concrete Bob; Cobham Water Mill, England’s oldest such “satanic� installation; Dunsfold Holy Well; the Crusader-built St Margaret of Antioch church in Fernhurst, West Sussex; and ruined Cowdray Castle.
Here, the pioneering group had a meeting with Lady Cowdray – artist, sculptor and adviser to the Oxford Mindfulness Centre – and a chance Halloween encounter in the castle’s ghostly chapel with a scythe-wielding Grim Reaper. When some of the pilgrims engaged him in conversation, he turned out to be Steven Payne, famous last year for his own recreation of a medieval pilgrimage – from Southampton to Canterbury.
One evening, our route took us along a deeply scooped path that looked as if it had once been a major bridleway. The mesmeric effect of walking for hours with the rhythm of others’ paces in your head, the hollow curve of the ground below and the head-torchlight on the branches above turned the world into an open-air tunnel.
The Trust’s founders point out that in Britain, the infrastructure for pilgrimages is already in place: the pubs, the footpaths, even a small number of underused churches, where pilgrims may be able to spend the night. The route picks a way along old but unlapsed footpaths between villages, ancient droving roads across the South Downs and an oddly perfect crescent of flatness that turned out to be a disused railway line. It can hardly help but be a bit of a spatchcock in such a built-on and bashed-about region as south-east England. But this is a strong part of its appeal – improvising, squeaking through, disdaining big roads, turning you into your own transport as only walking can.
At the Duke of Cumberland pub in the village of Henley, north of Midhurst, we’d formed a circle on the grass, ready to hurl yet another Jerusalem at the sky, when Will motioned us into the pub with his staff and asked the landlord’s permission to sing. A good few customers carried on talking, upping their volume to counter ours, but others joined in, tunefully too, and by the time we were slowing into green-and-pleasant-laaaand, the place was ringing like a bell.
We left, and a strange thing happened. A man, middle-aged, portly, came out after us. His face was shining like a lantern and he was lost for words. Not because of our singing, let’s be honest, but because of the thing itself, the song. The plain beauty and aspiration of it; even more than the lager, it reaches the parts that others can’t. Blake should have been here and, arguably, he was.
Way to go
A downloadable map of the route is available on the British Pilgrimage Trust website, which also has details of guided Jerusalem weekends and self-guided two-day walks with accommodation in churches, plus ideas for devising your own Jerusalem pilgrimage. In partnership with accommodation directory Sawday’s, it has a 1½ -day section of the walk from Dunsford to Haslemere , with a night at the luxury Barn at Roundhurst (twin/double from £130 B&B). The trust also organises other guided pilgrimages. Alan’s accommodation at the Halfway Bridge Inn (doubles £140 B&B) and Hornbeam Cottage (£140 for a two-night break) was provided by Sawday’s.
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