A modern pilgrimage through Herefordshire’s Golden Valley

I’m lying on my back. Directly above me is “a vault of heaven” with great wooden beams. I’ve never woken before under such a high ceiling – but then I’ve never gone to sleep in a church before.

nearby. Just as in Chaucer’s time, there’s no point doing a pilgrimage if you can’t eat heartily and swap stories with your fellow travellers, accompanied at the inn by local musicians having an impromptu ceilidh.

arranged by the British Pilgrimage Trust. Pilgrims can sleep there for a nominal £15 each – as rural accommodation can be costly or scarce. The Trust also arranges guided pilgrimages where luggage is transported for you by a “sherpa van” from church to church. All you need do, happily, is carry a day pack. They will even supply a pilgrim’s staff, hand-whittled from fallen wood and with a satisfying heft.

Our pilgrimage guide, Simon Lockett, assembles us in the churchyard where we lean on our staffs – inevitably someone makes a joke about a staff meeting – and talks us through the day’s journey, then leads us in a short prayer from the First Nations of North America about respect for animals.

. The emphasis is on those making their own personal journeys who might want peace and quiet at times to do so. Guides suggest some stretches of the walk are done in silence.

But that is generally later in the day when everyone has had time to do a bit of chattering. We set off along a wonderful green holloway carved by generations of travelling livestock, down into the Golden Valley – surely the best branding in the country – with its fields of high maize and deep broadleaved forests, where startlingly bright rowan berries are out in profusion.

The group is a mixed one: some from Norfolk, some from the south-east, one from Sweden – which replicates medieval pilgrimages, when people would often travel from overseas. Aneka is amused by the British penchant for stiles, uncommon in her native country.

Having crossed a fair few, we reach an unusual tree formation, where an oak and ash have fused to grow up out of the same trunk and a hawthorn has come to join the party. Michael, a builder from Kent, decides the triumvirate has to be climbed and heads up it in sandals, to the group’s general admiration.

because if carried in our packs it will warm up too much. This is the sort of logic that always make sense at the time.

It’s a happy party of pilgrims who crest the hill above Crasswall for our first view of the great bulk of the Black Mountains as a ridge to the west, so out of scale compared with what we’ve seen before that it’s like coming up from underwater to find an aircraft carrier looming in front of you.

These mountains form the great natural barrier between Wales and England. We don’t need the motte and bailey castles we come across to remind us that this was the scene of almost constant medieval warfare. Some swallows are determinedly mobbing a sparrowhawk that has had the temerity to fly down among them.

along the top of those Black Mountains and looked down on England from Wales – and speculated on how tempting those green fields of Herefordshire must have been for Welsh raiders determined to test the resolve of the marcher lords guarding them; but this is the first time I’ve seen the view looking back up.

, is so small it’s essentially a living room with a hatch to the kitchen. One beer only is kept on draught and a few shaven-headed farmers take on the passing pilgrims at a game of quoits.

In St Clydawg church there is still a list on the vestry wall from the local assizes of 1805 detailing the tithes that must be paid: two-and-a-half pence for each milking cow, but only two pence for any cow that is barren; four pence for any colt; and two pence for every day’s supply of hay stored. Parishioners memorialised in the graveyard, such as the wonderfully named Theophilus Cope, must have forked out considerable dues.

maintain its upkeep. The large Celtic cross has a plinth big enough to accommodate our group of nine as we eat packed lunches.

mean you can either self-guide and still stay in the churches, or sign up for occasional group walks such as ours.

from Southampton to Canterbury in honour of Thomas Becket, later suppressed by Henry VIII because he didn’t want to honour a troublesome priest – it also wants to create new ones, and in doing this it is reviving the vibrancy of the call of the pilgrimage. It’s a sign of spiritual health that new routes should be created.

in Spain has grown from fewer than 10,000 pilgrims 30 years ago to more than 200,000 today. For those who want a chance to reflect on their own lives or perhaps on the life of someone close to them who has recently died – or for anyone who wants to tap into the deep waters of the English past, such as the well of Saint Clodock we visit – a pilgrimage may answer a need.

I found the communal aspect appealing. There is a different and interesting dynamic in a pilgrimage group: less a feeling you’re a paying customer – although you are – who expects everything to be delivered and more a sense that you’re giving yourself as you go. That you are contributing to a group and sharing experiences, some of which can be revealed slowly over the course of the journey as you come to know each other. The range of subjects I learn about is enormous, from how to make blue cheese to the difference between a native and a turkey oak. And, as must have happened with pilgrims in the past, with the liberation of being away from home, people say things to strangers they might not share with family or friends. We are, in any case, all sleeping together every night – albeit each time in a different church.

Guided walks by the British Pilgrimage Trust in 2024 run from 8 May to 12 May ( four days at £450 ), (7 days at £740) and 18 September-22 September (four days at £450). Or self-guide using the instructions at britishpilgrimage.org .