A Road to a Shrine That No Longer Exists

The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury leads to the site of one of the richest shrines in medieval Europe, and the shrine at the end of it was deliberately destroyed.

Winchester to Canterbury

The route follows the crest of the North Downs from Winchester to Canterbury and the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in his own cathedral in 1170 and canonised three years later. The name is younger than the path: calling the Downs trackway the Pilgrims Way is a nineteenth-century usage, and much of the medieval traffic in fact came from London by the road Chaucer describes rather than along the Downs. The pilgrimage to Becket was immense, and Canterbury stood among the four or five great destinations of the Latin west.

An ending by royal order

The shrine did not decline so much as it was abolished. In 1538 it was destroyed on the order of Henry VIII, the treasure carted away, the bones removed and the cult suppressed as part of the break with Rome, and Becket was struck from the calendar as a traitor to royal authority rather than a martyr. The modern walk is therefore a route to an absence: the destination that made it a pilgrimage was removed by the state four centuries ago, and what remains is the cathedral and the memory of the shrine.