Some of the more consciously pilgrimage-like travel I have done, though, included going to Down House where Darwin lived and walking along the gravel path where he thought about evolution, and having a conversation about evolution. I think the re-enactment element was important there.
Another example was going to Canterbury Cathedral. I am not a Christian, but I find the story of Thomas a Becket moving, and I like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Jean Anouilh's play Becket.
Visiting stone circles always feels like a pilgrimage to me. They are beautiful and numinous places, and some archaeologists think they were made to represent a microcosm of the landscape.
Landscape itself, the wild places, are a place of pilgrimage for me; that’s where I go to feel renewed and refreshed.
I also think that places where people have made a connection with the numinous are special. As T S Eliot wrote in Little Gidding,
You are here to kneelOf course, I also regard visiting Unitarian churches as a pilgrimage—they are shrines of religious freedom, a testament to the courage of our Unitarian forebears.
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
Yvonne Aburrow
