I HAVE just returned from another September pilgrimage on St Aldhelm’s Way with my two oldest friends, and I find myself continuing to reflect on both the fissures and the continuities in the story of Christian faith in these islands. We did not attempt the whole of St Aldhelm’s Way, which runs 74 miles from Doulting to Malmesbury, the saint’s final resting place, and would have taken us at least a week. Having only three full days to play with, we picked up the trail in Bath, and followed it through Colerne, Littleton Drew, and, finally, to Malmesbury itself.

But, before we began, we paid a visit not to the ruins of an old religious house, but to the beautiful church and grounds of a living and thriving Benedictine community at Douai Abbey, in Upper Woolhampton, with its monastery of St Edward, King and Martyr, where we were warmly welcomed by one of the Brothers, who also took us into the chapel and prayed for us and with us, before sending us on our way with his blessings.

Thus we began with the living, even though our destination was a shrine to the dead; but two of the three of us, at least, shared the conviction that St Aldhelm and King Athelstan, both commemorated at Malmesbury, are with the God of the living and, in his glory, more alive than we are.

We were, indeed, walking in the midst of abundant life. The beautiful hills and combes of Wiltshire, the woods and rivers, glowed with life and colour in a run of almost perfect September days: crisp, bright, invigorating. Our Benedictine brother had prayed, among other things, for help and hospitality on the way, and we certainly had that in all the places we stayed, and the churches we stopped to visit and pray in on the way.

And we also found traces of St Aldhelm on the way, as, for example, in the beautiful parish church in Colerne, crowning the hill on which the village rests (Pevsner says, rather improbably, of the approach that you could imagine you were in Umbria!). Our steep climb up the hill was rewarded with a delightful church, which still has, set in a wall in the nave, two outer stones with entwined serpent motifs from an Anglo-Saxon cross, to commemorate a resting place on the last journey of St Aldhelm, as his body was brought for burial at Malmesbury, where he had been Abbot.

It was moving to touch them, and I said a prayer of thanksgiving, remembering that St Aldhelm, himself a poet and musician, is a patron saint of poets and songwriters. When we arrived in Malmesbury itself, on the last morning of our pilgrimage, and were refreshing ourselves with a very good breakfast in a local café, it happened that the Vicar of Malmesbury was also there. Recognising me, he came up and greeted us so warmly that we felt that we had been given the freedom of the place.

Again, the Abbey itself was so much more than a ruin; for, like Binham, it was also a thriving parish church. My friend Sean and I said, one last time, the “Pilgrimage Prayer”, written by Peter Knott, which we had been praying daily:

O Lord God, from whom we come,
in whom we are enfolded,
to whom we shall return.
Bless us in our pilgrimage through life,
with the power of the Father protecting,
with the love of Jesus indwelling,
and the light of the Spirit guiding,
until we come to our ending
in life and love eternal.