蜜芽传媒

Good Morning.

If you are going on holiday this year, will it be a vacation or a staycation?

As the vast majority of schoolchildren have now broken up for the big school holidays, many more families, it would seem, are opting to holiday in the UK rather than go abroad.

International uncertainty in many previous favoured destinations as well as the collapse of the low cost holiday company has led the Director of Visit England, Patricia Yates to also declare this week that 鈥淏ritain looks particularly good value at the moment because of the value of the pound.鈥�

No one is saying that, if you can afford a holiday, that you should stay at home. But a staycation, a holiday closer to home, seems like an attractive compromise.

One of the surprising facts about the British holiday market is the increasing popularity of so-called pilgrimage routes. The British Pilgrimage Trust suggests that 30 pilgrim routes have now been discovered in Britain. What鈥檚 more, since 2013, there鈥檚 been a 14% increase in people, of all faiths and none, engaging in pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage was a feature of the Roman Empire to a certain extent. But it took on a new guise in Anglo-Saxon Britain as Christianity spread. Rumours that a place had become holy, because of some miraculous event or the reputation of a great teacher, soon encouraged the faithful to flock there. The art critic Brian Sewell famously stressed the importance of relics as reasons why pilgrims wanted to connect with holy people in holy places 鈥� travelling together, sharing the journey, reflecting, being quiet, taking time out. Those things are the essence of the pilgrimage experience.

The emergence, though, of so many new pilgrim ways extends the notion of journeying in the great outdoors emphasising a spiritual reconnection with the natural world in a dramatic way. Organisers of the 133 mile long North Wales Pilgrim Way describe how a route has been mapped and waymarked, linking ancient churches dedicated to the saints of the 6th century whose [and I quote] 鈥済entle faith, entwined with a sense of the beauty and wonder of nature, still echoes with us today.鈥�

One of the most prolific contemporary Christian authors on the subject of pilgrimage as a perfect staycation is David Adam, a former Vicar of Holy Land who wrote 鈥� We need to capture again the ability to make short pilgrimages, to turn to God in our daily lives and actions.鈥�
In these unpredictable and fast changing times maybe people are returning to the pilgrim ways for a whole variety of reasons and, for many, because of a deep rooted and well established belief that things that happened long ago inspired people once, and they might just do it again.

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