In the summer of 2012, on a whim and with no experience of long-distance walking, Guy Stagg decided to trek the 60 or so miles from his home in London to Canterbury. Three years out of university, where he had battled against depression and alcoholism, he’d recently sought medical help to overcome his problems, and wondered whether walking might be beneficial.
Canterbury appealed to him, for its role “at the beginning of English literature” – he had been an English student at Cambridge. He set off having done virtually no planning, and arrived in Chaucer’s city two days later. He had walked under baking sun and driving rain with little protection, his heels bruised and his socks clotted with the blood from burst blisters.
But as he lay on the grass outside the cathedral, it wasn’t pain that registered – it was relief, “the deep calm that lies on the other side of tiredness”. Having endured months when he was too afraid to even leave his room, walking had broadened his vista – “making the world wide again”, he writes in his newly published book, The Crossway, about the role walking played in his recovery from depression.
Looking around, he noticed a stone on which was written the name of an ancient pilgrim route, the Via Francigena. And in that moment, Stagg made an extraordinary decision: to keep right on walking, following the path carved out by medieval Christians on the way to the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome. A few days later, having researched the journey some more, he became bolder still: now he’d press on to an even further holy city, Jerusalem, 5,500 km away. He wasn’t exactly sure why, he tells me when we meet at a central London café on a sunny morning, but of one thing he was certain: walking offered him something he needed: some healing, some respite and ultimately some hope.
“I didn’t understand why I was going, and I didn’t want to interrogate it too fully,” he explains. “I was being reckless, naive – and while I wasn’t entirely sure why, I believed it would help me to do this walk. I knew if I thought too much about it, I’d come up with reasons not to go. So I organised things as quickly as I could, and set out on 1 January 2013.”
He did more planning than he had for the Canterbury walk – but not a lot. Unlike the Santiago de Compostela Camino, a route that thousands of people follow each year, the Via Francigena isn’t very popular or commercialised, and there’s nothing like the huge amount of information available on it in books or online.
Leaving in the winter made little sense – “It was cold, and the days were short and dark. I got lost many times” – and he hadn’t even arranged where he was going to stay. “The hotels were too expensive: but what I realised was that if you went to a church or mosque along the route and explained what you were doing, they would help. I was like a medieval pilgrim: I had no plan, I simply trusted I’d find shelter.”
There was one big difference, though, between Stagg and the ancients in whose steps he trod: unlike them, he has no religious faith. “I’m not a believer,” he says. “I grew up in a family where church was for Christmas and Easter.” As he walked, “the dial on God didn’t change,” but his insights into the role of religious ritual in human life did. “I grew up, as many do, with the understanding that religion is a bunch of arguments about how the world works, and either you accept them or you reject them. But I’ve come to realise that’s not the whole story. Religion is about a lot more than belief: it’s about being in touch with something that’s moving and meaningful, even if it’s only moving and meaningful in a human rather than a supernatural way.” Stagg believes that the instinct to worship may even be a human need. “We’re hard-wired for it; it’s intrinsic to our nature. That’s why so many people have turned what in the past would have been worship of God to worship of something else – of shopping, of fashion, of sport.” Aspects of worship can, he says, offer psychological benefits. “If you go down on your knees, you’re humbling yourself, and that punctures the sense of yourself as the centre of the universe. On a pilgrimage you journey into the unknown and you have to ask others for help. So these are helpful experiences: they make you more grateful, less self-absorbed. They’re good for your mental health.”
In his book, Stagg recounts the colourful people and places he met along his journey, as well as the frightening moments. In the Alps, he was stuck in a snowstorm and was smuggled into a monastery by a kind monk who took pity on him. In Lebanon, he got caught up in a terrorist attack. He describes the peace of dawn prayer at an Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, the kindness of the Frenchwoman who bought him ice soles when she heard he was planning to cross the snowy mountains on foot, and the Turkish mosques where he was given dolma, goat’s cheese, olives, and endless cups of tea.
But around the mid-point of the journey, he hit despair. Having had high hopes for the benefits of the walk, he felt it wasn’t working. “I was still full of my memories, and my symptoms were returning. In Rome I had a panic attack, and I started drinking again. I thought, this journey is having the opposite effect to what I hoped.” Now, he says, he can see that hitting rock bottom was a necessary part of the journey back to health. “I realised I would have to go through the experiences I’d been trying to ignore; I had to face my demons, move through the pain.”
Unlike his arrival in Canterbury, getting to Jerusalem after almost 10 months turned out to be an anticlimax. “I felt very confused,” he remembers. “There was no big sense of triumph, no sudden epiphany.” He stayed in the area for a few days, musing that the point of pilgrimage is much more about the travelling than it is about the destination. “It made me realise that the destinations we set ourselves are arbitrary: they’re the excuse to do the journey, but what matters are the day-to-day experiences: they’re what give a pilgrimage value. They’re the purpose of it all.”
And the value of pilgrimage, it turned out, wasn’t completed when the end-point was reached. Instead, he has continued to ponder it and, little by little, begun to understand how it has helped him recover. “When I got to the end I knew something important had happened, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was through writing the book that I was able to digest the experience. The main things I took from it were the kindness of strangers, which gave me new hope in humankind, and a newfound sense of purpose and meaning in my life, which I realised through writing, and the knowledge that I had this story I wanted to share.”
He is, he says, in “a completely different place now. I’m not sure where my mental illness came from – it started during my time at university, and there was no original trauma or life event that explained it.” The low point was after he graduated: most people, he says, “leave university feeling their life is about to begin; I felt mine was ending”. And it almost did end: at one point, he made a serious suicide attempt, though failed to disclose the reason for his injuries when he was taken to hospital. During the time he was mentally ill, he says, he felt controlled by his thoughts. Today, that’s turned around. “One of the ways of thinking about mental illness is that you lose the ability to choose what you think about,” he says. “When I was ill I’d get a thought in my mind and be unable to get rid of it. These days I can experience negative emotions, but they don’t knock me off course the way they did in the past.”
Now 30, he’s working on another book, and the world seems to hold promise again. And if the practices of faith helped him achieve this better mental health, he wants to keep it going. He goes to evensong from time to time and meditates every day – and if he has any inkling of his depression descending, his first line of defence is to get out the map, and plan a mini-pilgrimage.
If any of the issues above have affected you, please contact the Samaritans, in the UK and Ireland, on 116 123.
• This article was amended on 27 August 2018 to correct the contact number for the Samaritans.
The Crossway by Guy Stagg is published by Picador, £16.99. Order a copy for £14.44 from guardianbookshop.com
