Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage in the novel is a concept that is both inherited from a centuries-old religious tradition and radically reimagined for a secular age. The book opens with an epigraph from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, quoting the lines "Who would true valour see, / Let him come hither" and "To be a pilgrim," immediately framing Harold Fry's journey within a literary and spiritual lineage. Yet Harold is no Christian soldier; he is a sixty-five-year-old retired man who has never walked farther than to his car. The narrative's central achievement is to take this ancient form—the pilgrimage as a quest for salvation—and translate it into a modern, personal, and entirely secular act of faith, where the destination is not a holy shrine but a hospice bed, and the salvation sought is not Harold's own but Queenie Hennessy's.

Definition and Origin

The concept of pilgrimage is introduced explicitly when Harold, having just begun his walk, stops at a hotel and tries to explain his mission. When he says he is walking for someone else who has cancer, a plump lady helpfully asks, "Do you mean a religious walk? A pilgrimage?" The word is offered as a clarification, a way of making sense of his otherwise inexplicable behavior. Her friend then quietly begins to sing "He Who Would Valiant Be," the hymn based on Bunyan's poem, her voice rising "pure and certain" while her face pinkens. Harold, unsure whether this performance is for the room or for her friend, smiles only because he has no idea what to say. This moment establishes the pilgrimage as a concept that others impose on Harold's journey, a frame he did not choose but which he comes to inhabit. The epigraph from The Pilgrim's Progress, with its promise that "There's no discouragement / Shall make him once relent / His first avowed intent / To be a pilgrim," serves as the novel's spiritual template, against which Harold's own faltering, doubt-ridden walk is measured.

The Secular Transformation

Harold's pilgrimage is defined less by its destination than by its method. When he first decides to walk, standing in a phone box at the other end of England from Queenie, he pictures her dozing while he stands "in a phone box at the other, with things in between that he didn't know and could only imagine: roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valleys, and so many people." The decision comes "in the same moment as the idea," with no deliberation or reasoning, and he laughs at its simplicity. This is not a religious calling but an instinctive, almost absurd act of love. The young man Mick, whom Harold meets south of Coventry, names it for what it has become: "What you're doing is a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century. It's awesome. Yours is the kind of story people want to hear." Mick's framing is crucial—the pilgrimage is not sacred but newsworthy, a story that resonates because it is both extraordinary and deeply human. Harold's own explanation is more modest: "I don't push it and I don't hang about. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I'm going to get there." The pilgrimage is reduced to its most basic mechanical principle, one foot after another, yet this simplicity is precisely what gives it its power.

Walking as Faith and Memory

The act of walking itself becomes the pilgrimage's core article of faith. Harold's journey is not a series of staged events but a continuous, almost meditative state. He takes A-roads, B-roads, lanes and tracks, following the compass that quivers northwards, walking "by day or by night, as the mood took him; mile after mile after mile." He sleeps when the need comes and then returns to his feet, walking "under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones." This rhythm of walking and resting, of moving through wind and weather and beneath sun-bleached skies, becomes a form of prayer. Harold's faith is not in God but in the walk itself: "Queenie would live. He knew it." The pilgrimage also becomes a mechanism for memory. As Harold walks, he "unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid," and it "chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own." He no longer measures distance in miles but "with his remembering." The physical act of walking—the blisters, the aching feet, the growing beard—anchors him in his body even as his mind roams freely through the past, making the pilgrimage a journey inward as much as outward.

The Liminal State and Connection with Strangers

The pilgrimage removes Harold from the ordinary structures of life and places him in a liminal state, where he is "between places" and open to new forms of connection. After his first night sleeping in a barn, he continues to sleep outside, choosing dry places and being careful not to upset things. He washes in public lavatories, fountains and streams, and rinses his clothes where no one is watching. He thinks of the "half-forgotten world lived in houses and streets and cars, where people ate three times a day, slept by night, and kept each other company," and he is glad they are safe, but also glad that he is "at last outside them." This detachment from domestic life allows him to meet strangers with a radical openness. He walks with a tax inspector who is a Druid and has not worn shoes for ten years, a young woman on the trail of her real father, a priest who confesses to tweeting during mass, a white witch from Glastonbury, a homeless man who drank away his house, four bikers looking for the M5, and a mother of six who confides that she had no idea life could be so solitary. Harold listens to all of them and judges no one. He learns that "it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too." The world, he realizes, "was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other," and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time. This is the pilgrimage's communitas—a temporary, egalitarian bond with strangers that transcends social hierarchy.

The Pilgrimage's Corruption and Harold's Renunciation

The purity of Harold's pilgrimage is tested when others begin to join him and the journey acquires a public dimension. The young man Rich informs the group that something is needed to distinguish the real pilgrims from their followers. He has contacted an old friend in PR, who has arranged for the distributors of a health drink to provide all official walkers with T-shirts bearing the word PILGRIM on the front and back, available in white and in three sizes. Kate scoffs, asking where they are going to wash white shirts, but Rich insists, "White stands out. And its image is pure." The pilgrimage, once a private act of faith, is here commodified and branded, its spiritual purity reduced to a marketing image. Harold's response to this corruption is not to fight it but to strip his own journey back to its essentials. In Cheltenham, he donates his washing powder to a student, offers his wind-up torch to a woman who cannot find her key, gives his plasters and antiseptic cream to the mother of a distressed child with a bleeding knee, and hands his guide to Britain to a bewildered German couple. He rewraps the gifts for Queenie—the pot of honey, the rose quartz, the glittering paperweight, the Roman key ring and the wool hat—and parcels up the recent souvenirs for Maureen, sending them to a post office. He keeps only the compass and the rucksack, because they are not his to give away. This act of renunciation is the pilgrimage's deepest expression: Harold sheds his possessions, his wallet, his watch, even his identity as a man with things, until all that remains is the walk itself and the people he carries in his heart.

Significance

The pilgrimage in the novel is ultimately a redefinition of faith for a secular world. It is not a journey to a holy place but a journey toward another person, an act of love expressed through the simple, relentless repetition of putting one foot in front of the other. Harold's walk transforms him from a man who has spent twenty years avoiding the past into one who walks so surely "it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair." The pilgrimage gives him a purpose that transcends his own life, a way of atoning for his failures as a father and husband, and a means of connecting with the world he had shut out. It is, as Mick says, a pilgrimage for the twenty-first century—not because it is new, but because it takes an ancient form and fills it with a modern, humanist meaning. The novel's epigraph from Bunyan promises that no discouragement shall make the pilgrim relent, and Harold, despite his doubts, his collapses, and his moments of despair, does not relent. He walks to Berwick, and in doing so, he becomes a pilgrim in the truest sense: one who sets out not knowing the way, but trusting that the way will reveal itself, one step at a time.