Via Francigena, Caminos, Cathedrals – pilgrimages today are as likely cycled as walked, and they’re not all about saints now either. Rob Ainsley, veteran of several odysseys, selects 10 soul-stirring rides...
SUDDENLY, CYCLING THE VIA FRANCIGENA is a thing. Five years ago, I hadn’t even heard of this Canterbury-to-Rome epic. Now it seems half the people I know have done it. And the other half are planning to. It’s more than a grand-scale bike route. It’s a pilgrimage, walked or horsed for centuries, for reasons transcending tourism. For the faithful, the journey is logged in some celestial ledger rather than Strava. And the payback is the writing off of all sins, not just a few kudoses.
The most famous bike pilgrimage is the Camino de Santiago, the network of ancient pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela in western Spain. As big for medieval Christians as the hajj still is for Muslims, it dwindled in popularity until the 1990s, when only a few hundred a year did it. But the millennial focus on self-discovery saw it boom again, and now 300,000 do it annually – 25,000 of them on two wheels.
New routes are appearing too: the 2021 Cathedrals Route visits 42 of them over 1,850 miles around England.
Why are biking pilgrimages so popular? Not often religion, but rather, wider motivations: meditative slow-travel, vague ‘spirituality’, maybe ‘finding yourself’. Whatever, they’re much more practicable than walking for those of us with limited time, and cyclists are welcome in the network of super-cheap hostels and eateries in historic towns and villages along the way.
We have 10 very varied bike pilgrimages to inspire you to go on a journey of discovery, whatever your beliefs or non-beliefs.
The Epic
Via Francigena: Canterbury to Rome
1,300 miles
Follow in the footsteps of Sigeric the Serious. Cool name, cool guy: as Archbish of Canterbury, he was a notable early exponent and proto-blogger of the great pilgrimage to Rome in 990. The formal route goes from Calais down northeastern France and western Switzerland before the fabulous final stretch from the Gran San Bernardo pass into Italy, down the Po Valley to Siena and Rome. Most cyclists, though, follow the signed (mostly) Eurovelo 5 through Lille, Brussels, Luxembourg, Strasbourg and Basel, before the final well-signed (mostly) Italian legs. All-tarmac versions are possible; but decent gravel stretches, es
