Today, we continue to welcome many people every year, both setting out on, and finishing, their journey of pilgrimage.
Thank you for your interest in organising a pilgrimage which includes Winchester Cathedral, we look forward to welcoming you and wish you well on your travels.
What is Pilgrimage?
A pilgrimage is a devotional practice which consists of making a special journey to a place of spiritual significance.
The reasons people take the pilgrim road are varied. For some it is to deepen their faith and knowledge of God, for others it is to reflect on change in their lives or to seek healing, while for others it is an opportunity to reengage with the natural world and themselves through human encounters and the challenge that the journey often brings.
A pilgrimage is inherently a transient experience as the pilgrim leaves the comfort of their home to embark on the new and unknown. It blends a spiritual purpose with physical practice that often leaves the pilgrim changed by their encounters and experiences. A pilgrimage can involve either a short or long journey and it may be in a group or alone, through the countryside or cityscape and can be done on foot, by bicycle, car or horse.
The destination is a place of significance. Most pilgrim routes follow ancient paths, taking people to places made holy by events that have happened there, in the footsteps of those who have gone before them or which have an inherent spiritual significance.
Why Winchester?
For over a thousand years, Winchester has been a place of significant pilgrimage. Whether this was to pray at the Shrine of St Swithun, or to begin the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury, or to continue on the Camino Inglés, the ‘English Way’, to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, pilgrims have journeyed to and from Winchester along many pilgrim paths, east and west, north and south.
Today, many pilgrims still follow the Pilgrims’ Way, a designated route from Winchester to Canterbury; or they are following the route of the Camino Inglés, from Reading to Southampton; or they are including Salisbury, or the South Downs’ Way in their pilgrimage route.
