St Cuthbert's Way

by Mary Low, Dick Warren (Illustrator)

St Cuthbert's Way runs from Melrose in the Scottish borders to Lindisfarne, Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland. This new Pilgrims' Companion presents information essential for walking the Way, a field guide to places of interest along the route, an introduction to St Cuthbert and his time, songs, meditations and stories together with ideas and resources for a contemporary pilgrimage experience.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2000

Reviews

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strength of this handbook is in its portrayal of the people who originally trod the paths up to and surrounding Lindesfarne. Cuthbert, Aidan, Bede and Boisin come alive in these pages in a skilled melding of manuscript learning and landscape exploration. For this reason in particular I’d love to visit and tread some of the pilgrim path myself.

While those of us who read the book thousands of miles from Lindesfarne can skip the suggestions of what to carry , where to stay and how many stairs, these details do give a sense of locality and journey. It’s a tricky business to write such a guide in a world that changes as quickly as ours - detailed travel advice is out of date as it’s written. Mary Low has, I think, gone for a sensible level of advice without too much of the detail that will render the book quickly obsolete.

I appreciated the inclusion of landscape markers of later periods of history than the founding saints - Covenanters, Jacobites and industrialists for example.

Even from 16,224 km away this was inspiring.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's not exactly a guide book in the "walk 200 yards and then turn left" sense (although it does have some information for disabled pilgrims), it's more of a cultural guidebook. It has a lot of information about St Cuthbert himself and about Christianity in the borderlands and Northumberland. As I knew very little about that, I found it very interesting. The author also has a nice writing voice, respectful, clearly well informed, with a hint of scepticism here and there. Even so, she leaves the reader to make up their own minds and to experience St Cuthbert's Way in their own ways.
Recommended!