Scottish Catholic Observer

Andrew Bruce from Glencaple has raised over £100,000 for the Help for Heroes Campaign with his arduous fundraising walk from London to Rome, which took almost three months. The money raised will help pay for top of the range prosthetic limbs for maimed service men and women.

Upon setting off from St Paul’s Cathedral in London he was given a letter to present to the Pope from the Anglican Bishop Richard Chartes of London and, upon his arrival in Rome, the British Embassy arranged for him to be present at the Pope’s weekly general audience on the October 5.

“I gave the Pope my two minute spiel about my walk and at the beginning he said ‘welcome, welcome’ then ‘wonderful, wonderful’ and at the end he said ‘fantastic, fantastic,” he said. “It was a surreal experience but a real highlight.”

He had followed the Via Francigena medieval pilgrimage route from St Paul’s Cathedral in London on July 7 to St Peter’s Basilica in The Vatican City. Although he is not a Catholic he said he’s always enjoyed walking pilgrimage routes and in 2007 he raised £68,500 for Help for Heroes by completing a solo 1255-mile walk in 57 days from Geneva in Switzerland to Santiago de Compostela in north west Spain.

“Those routes tend to have a lot of history associated with them and are very interesting to walk along as well as being very hard physically,” he said. “And on this route I went over three mountain ranges the Juras, the Alps and the Apennines.”

However the physical challenges where not the only hardship he faced as his father died just as he entered the Alps.

“I was just over half way through the walk in the Aoste Valley in northern Italy when I got the news of my father’s death,” he said. “I had to return to Dumfries for 10 days for his funeral and then return to the walk. It wasn’t a pleasant experience to bury a parent, and it was also tough to have to break the rhythm of the walk.”

Despite these and other difficulties including being injured after a vision-impaired Italian driver hit him with his car Mr Bruce said he was absolutely delighted with the success of the walk, having met his target of raising a £100,000.

“It’s an amazing amount, I was worried that with the recession the target might be a bit ambitious but thanks to the generosity of strangers we’ve got there,” he said. “Of course, I did the walking!”

He is also very pleased to have been able to make sure a difference to the Help for Heroes campaign.

“I’m an old fashioned patriot without being jingoistic about it,” he said. “What ever you think about the rights or wrongs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan young men and women are coming back mangled, without their legs and they need looked after. In some cases they have 60 years of life ahead of them and we have a national debt to make sure those years should be as positive as possible.”

—Anyone who wishes to make a donation to can do so at http://www.bmycharity.com by entering the name ‘Andrew Bruce’ in the Find a Friend box.

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