For most of you who read this the words, “we are now resting in Châlons-en-Champagne” will not mean a great deal. OK, it is a small city in the southern part of the Champagne region edging onto the river Marne. You can easily find it on Google maps. It’s a place. But we walked here and we did so with purpose because we are pilgrims.

I’m sorry but that isn’t quite what I was going to say to start all of this, but let’s just go with it.

Since we began walking there has been a strong sense of something below the surface as we have moved along each day. A bit like a strong pulse of electricity that you can sense but is not easily found and pointed at. Part of this began with the anticipation of the walk.

We had been waiting for a good couple of years or so before we were able to start this walk. And our start times were delayed due to illness and my damn knee injury (sorry! All my own fault). And when we began the walk, we were faced with a pretty harsh injury that Alison suffered but just went with and coped with and we can now say, the wound is a fraction of what it was when we restarted our walking in Kent. Because of the wounds and our concerns that it would be OK, we even went to A&E the night before the ferry trip and also had a follow up appointment on the morning of the crossing before we headed off across the water.

But, somehow, the momentum of pilgrimage was already too strong to slow us down by much.

And, as we began the French route, we sensed other things going on, cutting into our sensibilities, short wiring our focus, but only to get us more on track. We sensed before we knew it that we were deep in the territory wrenched from peace by two world wars. We are not ignorant of history but we were not on a tour of historic sites from WW1 and WW2, we were on the historic Francigena route to Rome, along a way described by a guy who walked it over a thousand years before….

But the ground was not letting us past without acknowledging the harsh truths of history. I had nightmares in one place that felt like the past was not going to let go, we walked by so many places with stories, so much destruction and, yes, so much hope, too. And we began to find a balance there as we trudged across sweeping open fields, cut along deep cut paths that were the sunken roads on the front, down into valleys where nothing had been left when the shelling stopped, and yet people had come back and rebuilt…. Yet again.

And the rivers and many canals we walked along seemed dark and murky ribbons of water until something broke the surface and gobbled a fly or leapt up and really took a fly with a splash at the end. The fields could mesmerise into a trance, then we would stop, stunned to see two hares racing each other across the side of the hill, their long legs hardly touching the surface as they went fast between the furrows. We followed one of their cousins the wrong way up a hill before realising we had gone the wrong way, but were rewarded by the view we got as we cut along another path to re-join the official route. 

A deep brown deer grazing in a field of beets distracted us and, as we slowly walked along watching its grace as it fled the scene, we missed our turning and ended up walking about a kilometre further than we needed to – but we were not upset. This was something special we would not have wanted to miss.

The buzzards, making their strangely plaintive cries as they wheel along the edge of the woodland together, hunting and enjoying the early morning sun as it heats up the furrows below them and cuts long shadows for them along the deeply etched earth, have entranced us as we walk steadily along the edge of the same fields.

How can we be part of all of this? How can this be part of us?

And still, there is an unsettling in our hearts that is not bad, just something that keeps us on edge, keeps us aware of where we are and about the something that we keep walking into, opening ourselves to.

And, as we continue, we keep talking about things.

One thing that has kept with us, worrying away at our hearts, is the story of the people whose lands we have been crossing. People who were invaded by armies who tore apart their land, turned their villages into rubble and destroyed their fields, replacing them with hellish swamps of poisoned, death-filled mud.

Some became refugees who were forced to flee and find homes elsewhere until the war was finished.

Some remained and tried to maintain as much of their lives as possible, trying to keep hope and dignity in their hearts as they endured that endless hell.

Then, when the war was done, when the leaders declared peace and everything was allowed to become “normal” again, they had the task of trying to find their homes and their lives again. How could they do it? How did they do it? Why did they even come back?

But we have walked through those landscapes and met their children and their children’s children, we have seen what they have achieved and the evidence of their determined hope and faith. Part of this sense we have been touched by lies in these troubling and up lifting details. We imagine what it must be like for people across the world today whose lives are being, or have been affected in similar ways and gain hints of just how hard these people’s lives must be, but this land, on the doorstep of Britain, went through these terrors during periods of time that are very familiar to us, too. We have a lot of shared experience, shared losses, hard memories. There are places in Britain where refugees from France and Belgium were taken in without any hesitancy and where links still lie deep between both communities even now. We just don’t hear about them.

So the life that lurks deep in the dark green canal is just as real as the birds sweeping past us along the surface of the water. The sense of place is vibrant wherever we go and the people open up brief doors and let us glimpse new life.

And yes, this shows itself in so many ways. I have included a few photos from the last couple of days but the last ones seem to sum up how the ordinary and extraordinary often come together to surprise you.

We took the chance to visit the cathedral in Châlons and as I was standing at the door looking back it occurred to me that this amazing building actually faced a large set of buildings on the other side of the road. I couldn’t see any openings in the line of buildings facing the cathedral at all. Walking back down the road I eventually could see the canal but it did not seem to line up with the church’s façade. Yet I photographed views of the façade as we approached the city. Strange, I thought. Something to try to work out the next time we visit. Pilgrims don’t get the chance to retrace their steps to work out things like that.

We entered the cathedral and were both impressed by its interior and a number of the bits of surviving medieval glass but the thing that took us by complete surprise was the long and large glass walled cabinet set to one side of the church. Someone had constructed a series of hills and valleys, well a hilly landscape and it was covered with a series of scenes from Christ’s life, mainly focussing on the story of the passion. And all of the characters were Playmobile figures.

That was the sort of weird that is quite hard to beat, but, weirdly, it worked! Kids of a certain age range will mark it down as their best ever bit of church, by a mile… and they will know what all the scenes are about, too….

So, we are now resting in Châlons en Champagne, we have recently toasted all sorts of special people with some bubbly, picnicked in our room, as is custom, and are still feeling that frisson shared by pilgrims everywhere who are on the move. You can plan where to walk the next day but you really don’t know what will find you as you set off along the road….