Posted on: 16th October 2026

I recently walked a part of the Norfolk Coast Path waymarked by medieval churches. With 13 miles under my feet, I returned to my route’s origin by bus. It would have been easy to close my eyes and slumber for 30 minutes, or to scroll mindlessly through a day’s worth of social-media posts.

Instead, taking advantage of the vacant front seat on the top deck, I tried to reflect on the pilgrimage that I had just made. Travelling at roughly eight times the speed of my outward journey, on a parallel route, and elevated by some ten feet, I found it an unsatisfactory exercise, however. A large part of me (not my calves) wished that I was walking back the way I had come: traversing the same path, at the same speed, and with my feet firmly on the ground. In other words, literally retracing my steps.

It is often said that pilgrimage is as much, if not more, about the journey as it is the destination. But, when people speak about “the journey”, they almost always mean the journey to the place of pilgrimage and never from it. The journey back is often done less attentively, and with a greater focus on convenience.

I think this is because we tend to understand Christian pilgrimage as reflecting the (very much one-way) “pilgrimage of life”. We think of a pilgrimage in two stages: the getting there, which mirrors the Christian life on earth, and the being there, which mirrors our hoped-for home in heaven. The pilgrimage is over, in effect, the moment we take leave of the place to which we have travelled.

But I wonder whether that is to misunderstand Christian pilgrimage. It is precisely because pilgrimage is a microcosm of the journey from earth to heaven that the journey back is significant. We cannot remain at the place of pilgrimage, no more than Moses can stay on Sinai, or the magi tarry at the crib, or the disciples linger on the mount of transfiguration, or Mary Magdalene stand at the empty tomb. The journey home is necessary. So, how might the experience of pilgrimage be enriched if the return leg is made as attentively, and even by the same means, as the outward journey?

In his book The Old Ways: A Journey on foot, Robert Macfarlane explores the palindromic nature of walking. He illustrates this with the example of walking in snow. He explains how, when snow is exposed to the sun, it is the snow that has not been trodden on which melts first. The compressed snow under the footprint melts more slowly. This makes it possible, for a while, for footprints to stand out in relief. “A few times, coming down a winter mountain on the same path by which I ascended it, I have met my own footprints, raised up as footplinths.”

Macfarlane observes that this is as profound as it is counter-intuitive. “The uncanniness of such moments has its source in the encounter with the altered traces of an earlier self,” he writes. “The world has been slightly but importantly shifted between your first passage and your return, and this feeling accords with the more familiar experience of having been changed by the upper world of the mountains, and by the hours and miles that intervene between ascent and descent.”

Macfarlane’s observation rings true for the Christian pilgrim. We go on pilgrimage to encounter God and to be changed by that encounter. It is only in the return journey that we will be able to discern how that encounter has changed us. By travelling back more carefully, and by making a comparison with the version of ourselves which made the outward journey, we are more open to those “altered traces of an earlier self”.

“The journey out is the foundation,” the Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, writes in The Way Under Our Feet: A spirituality of walking (Books, 17 July 2020), “and on the journey back when we’ve been influenced by our experiences, we see the route from a different direction.”

WHEN planning a pilgrimage, I think there are two things that we could do to cherish the journey back. First, if the outward journey is to be made by a relatively unhurried means of transport (for example, by foot or by bicycle), to consider whether it is feasible to travel back by the same means. In other words, to give to both legs of the journey the same investment of time and energy.

And, second, regardless of transport, to make the return journey more prayerful and reflective. This might include a liturgy of leave-taking, or passages of scripture and prayers to be used on the way home. It might also include some form of thanksgiving on return, perhaps mirroring the liturgy used as the pilgrimage began. Pilgrims might be encouraged to ask themselves and one another how God, through this pilgrimage, has changed them.

It may well be that, by giving space to reflect on the transformative effect of pilgrimage, we will observe something different on our return. Instead of being the same as we were before we left, we will know ourselves truly changed and transformed. Instead of leaving the blessings that we have received at the place of our pilgrimage, we will bring them home with us.

The Revd Daniel Sandham is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Winchmore Hill, and Area Dean of Enfield, in the diocese of London. Blog gratefully borrowed from The Church Times for Network Leeds.