The fully developed ambulatory-with-radiating-chapels plan matured in Western Europe largely during the Romanesque period, from roughly the eleventh century onward, driven directly by the practical demands of the era's major pilgrimage routes, most famously the roads across France leading to the shrine of Saint James at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Churches built specifically to serve as waypoints or destinations on these routes, such as Sainte-Foy at Conques and Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, developed the ambulatory and radiating chapel arrangement precisely because their builders anticipated large, continuous crowds of pilgrims needing to venerate relics without interrupting the community's own regular liturgical life, a design problem the ambulatory solved directly by giving pilgrim traffic its own dedicated circulation path independent of the sanctuary.
The form carried forward into Gothic cathedral building, where the ambulatory and chevet became an increasingly sophisticated, heavily glazed architectural set piece in its own right at major cathedrals such as Chartres and Notre-Dame de Paris, even as the specific pilgrimage traffic that had originally justified the form sometimes diminished.
Beyond Western Europe, comparable circulation solutions letting worshippers move around a central sacred point without crossing it appear independently in other traditions, including the circumambulation paths built around stupas and around the garbhagriha of some Hindu temples, though those forms developed from different architectural and ritual logics rather than from any direct historical connection to the Christian ambulatory.