Scottish Catholic Observer

SCOTLAND’S answer to the European-wide revival of pilgrimage routes, the ‘Caledonian Camino,’ has won the support of Roseanna Cunningham, cabinet secretary for environment, climate change and land reform.

Ms Cunningham, a great lover of the outdoors and keen walker, said she hoped Scotland’s own pilgrimage routes will become popular among both religious and non-religious communities.

The ‘Caledonian Camino,’ promoted by the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum (SPRF), charts a west to east journey across Scotland from Iona to St Andrews, allowing walkers to enjoy Scotland’s countryside and engage with some its rich religious history.

“The whole route I think is a tremendous narrative about Scotland and Scotland’s history,” Ms Cunningham told the SCO. “It describes the kind of change from the Celtic Church in Iona right through to the high medieval Catholic ruins at St Andrews.

“That’s how Scotland grew, from the west through to the east, so there’s the ecclesiastical history with all of that in our landscape. The place names all the way through reflect that, that spread of Christianity from the west right through, across not just geography but time as well,” she added.

Three Saints Way

Combining her love of walking and exploration of Scotland’s countryside with her own Catholic faith, Ms Cunningham has been part of a steering group that promotes the Three Saints Way, a section of the route that charts the journeys of three Celtic saints—St Fillan, St Serf and St Kessog—on their missionary duties. Over almost a decade, the group has seen the route through from hopeful beginnings to winning support from other organisations, including the SPRF. Establishing smaller parts of the overall route, Ms Cunningham thinks, will be a big impetus for completing it.

“It’s quite a daunting prospect because it’s a very long way and it includes sections where there is precious little in the way of the kind of structure that you would want to see, and other areas that are probably not quite ready to go,” she said. “What’s happened more recently is that Scottish Natural Heritage has now taken on the idea because they’re now looking at national trails. That doesn’t mean to say that there will be a top-down development of it.

“What happened two or three years ago was that locally, I decided that what we could start doing was promoting a section of it, and the section of it was Killin to St Andrews.

“We’ve gotten it to the point where we’ve described the route, we’ve had some money to do scoping studies for some of the areas, and we’re now discussing a partnership with Perth and Kinross Countryside Trust to take this forward, so it’s beginning to move beyond just the enthusiastic work of hopeful volunteers and get a certain amount of input from organisations who can give us better help to move us along more quickly.”

Volunteers

The MSP was keen to stress the voluntary aspect of the route’s establishment. “It is very much volunteer-run and ground-up,” she said. “I know I’m the local MSP for a big chunk of it, but those involved include people who have small businesses who are enthusiastic walkers. We’re talking to walking groups all along the way as well, so it’s kind of important it is from the ground up rather than coming from any other organisation.”

In addition to her promotion of the Iona to St Andrews route, Ms Cunningham also believes there are many benefits to walking in general, citing it as her own way to relax, something beneficial for both mental and physical health and something that can often be done by people with disabilities, now that some routes are suitable for them.

“There are lots of reasons to do these walks, and people can engage with these walks in all sorts of ways,” she said.

Ecumenicalism

As a member of St Fillan’s Catholic Church in Crieff, and with the local Episcopal church called St Columba’s, Ms Cunningham is keen to encourage Catholics and other Christian denominations to get involved. “I have written to all the churches along the way, all the ministers, all the priests, everything to basically flag up and say ‘we’re trying to do this, we would like all the churches to engage with this as well.’

“I certainly hope the Catholic churches along the way will get involved. We’ve had a very active involvement of the Episcopalians already, and I wouldn’t want us to be left behind, so I very much hope they and the Church of Scotland become actively involved too,” she said.

Ms Cunningham points out that the Iona to St Andrews route not only helps communities along the way economically as a result of walkers passing through, but also helps Scots to engage with their country’s history and geography.

“Different people will get different things out of it. People who’ve got a strong sense of their spiritual past and the history of Scotland are going to get a strong feeling of that out of it because it is Iona to St Andrews, it’s linking that change from the Celtic church through to the Roman Church.

“All those monks would have walked out across this landscape, so you’re recreating some of what they experienced 1,500 years ago or whatever. People will get that strong sense of connection, which I think is important—connecting to their own history and to that experience of those early missionaries.

“But all of the local communities that folk walk through will tell you how important it is to have people staying the night in the bed and breakfasts, the small hotels. It keeps restaurants open, keeps cafes going, because walkers always want to get a decent bed at night, to find somewhere to have an evening meal to stop off, or have a coffee or take a side trip into one of the communities.”

Despite it being described as a pilgrimage route, the MSP feels it’s something from which both religious and non-religious Scots could gain something positive.“People are trying to reconnect to some of that earlier understanding of faith and being that I think everybody—it doesn’t really matter what faith you are—could benefit from.”

—This story ran in full in the August 19 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.