The BPT offers a hashtag campaign to help clean up Britain’s holy places – #SalubriousSaturday aka Make a Holy Place Healthy Again #MAHPHA Come Saturday, make the journey (pilgrimage) to your favourite holy place – be it holy well, church, tree, hilltop, or cathedral – and to help to make it healthier by removing the […]
The BPT has pioneered what may be Britain’s first Festival Pilgrimage route! Will Parsons, co-founder and original visionary of BPT, has teamed up with Smugglers Festival in East Kent to create a pilgrimage route that festival-goers can follow. Read more: So you want to head along to one of Kent’s best small festival events, for […]
The Old Way makes the Telegraph’s 20 top walks ‘with added meaning’. BPT co-founder William Parsons tells the Telegraph all about it in this article listing Britain’s top 20 pilgrimage walks, ones with spiritual, heritage and literary ‘added meaning’… Also listed are two routes developed by BPT’s Guy Hayward for the English Heritage project in […]
Hugh Thomson writes on the Old Way Pilgrimage’s great potential as a route to help usher in a new era of British pilgrimage, in this article in the Spectator.
Radio 4 recently ran a ‘One-to-One’ show which featured Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves), with William Parsons guiding her on a very short pilgrimage on the Old Way. Listen in here:
At the end of Will’s “100 Silences” pilgrimage, he gave the remnants of the battlefield soil carried from Southampton to local children in Brixton, who laid it on the war memorial (built only last year) for African and Caribbean servicemen. This is the article as written for the local Brixton newspaper: Young and old join […]
Ancient pilgrimage route to Canterbury rediscovered by PAUL WILKINSON 10 AUGUST 2018 — AN ANCIENT pilgrimage route to Canterbury has been rediscovered by a group of enthusiasts who plan to relaunch it by 2020, and the 850th anniversary of the murder of St Thomas Becket. The 150-mile route from Southampton was found on a map from the […]
This September, Will wrote an article for the National Churches Trust Annual Review, about his vision for pilgrimage in Britain and how churches can become places that more people engage with through the open act of pilgrimage. Have a read of the article here: https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/news/churches-and-pilgrimage-how-get-britain-going-again Here’s a quote from the article: “We have seen time […]
The Old Way pilgrimage recently featured in the Slow Edition of Suitcase Magazine, an award-winning travel mag much loved by ‘influencers’ globally. Will guided Rae the journalist on the last four days of the route, rich with castles, holy wells, ancient trees, and more churches than you can shake a pilgrim staff at. It was […]
The Old Way pilgrimage is recommended by the Guardian newspaper as one of Britain’s 20 best British micro breaks! https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/mar/31/20-great-mini-adventures-in-the-uk-britain-walks-cycles-wales-england-scotland
Will and Guy interviewed in Passion Passport, a Californian-based magazine, about their visions of pilgrimage. (Photos © Will Parsons). The Art of Pilgrimage
We are very glad to share this article about the Old Way and the BPT’s work with you. Many thanks to Harriet Compston and the Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/articles/british-pilgrimage-trust-walks-canterbury/
Will and Guy, founders of the British Pilgrimage Trust, recently featured on a host of local radio stations – right across the country. Will has stitched these interviews together into one exciting clip. Give it a listen!
The British Pilgrimage Trust’s Patron Rupert Sheldrake was recently interviewed on Russell Brand’s “Under the Skin” podcast. Here Will has edited pilgrimage-relevant excerpts from the interview. Brand on Pilgrimage: “To me it sounds bloody delightful” – “It’s the sort of thing I might do, actually” – “I wanna go to a bloody cathedral”
Will speaks to Radio 4 at the Green Pilgrimage Conference in Canterbury Cathedral. Pilgrimage is more popular than ever, with hundreds of thousands of people travelling great distances to visit holy places on foot; an experience that is inextricably connected to the natural world. There is an increasing amount of interest in how to make […]
Alex Strangwayes-Booth makes pilgrimage on the Old Way, interviewing Will of the BPT (and other Oldwayers).
One of Will’s promotional pilgrimages, in 2017 we walked to the source of the song Jerusalem to honour the 100 year anniversary of its becoming a song, was picked up twice by BBC Radio Sussex/Surrey. It took Will a month to design and plan this event, which led the group to the original manuscript of […]
To self-guide a weekend micro-pilgrimage to the song Jerusalem, we recommend Alastair Sawdays’ website (slow travel and special places specialists), who detail a section of our route from Dunsfold to Haslemere, staying in the amazing Roundhurst Barns – an unforgettable night of wooded luxury at the foot of the Black Downs, where in the morning […]
WHAT IS BRITISH PILGRIMAGE? Pilgrimage is one of the most important British activities you’ve haven’t heard of. It’s a fundamental cultural technology used throughout history all over the world: but not in modern Britain. There’s a lot of loaded language here, so we need to define terms from the ground up. Pilgrimage is making journeys […]
A film by Will Parsons, showing part of an Old Way recce. Our pilgrimage began at St Nicolas Pevensey, a Church built by William the Conqueror in thanks for his victory over King Harold and his conquest of England. Many landscapes are passed, from the military to the empty ghost lands of Manxey levels, which […]
William Parsons, and Guy Hayward, founders of the British Pilgrimage Trust, were honoured to be featured on BBC1 Songs of Praise during their pilgrimage from London to Walsingham. Will had devised a pilgrimage route connecting Willesden and Walsingham, and he had found a song to offer for each day of the pilgrimage (you can listen […]