Pilgrims' Way

Pilgrims' Way
Pilgrims' Way near Westwell, Kent
Length	192 km (119 mi)
Location	South Eastern England, United Kingdom
Trailheads	Winchester, Hampshire Shrine of Thomas Becket, Canterbury, Kent
Use	Hiking, cycling and byway; former pilgrim way
Hiking details
Season	All year

The Pilgrims' Way (also Pilgrim's Way or Pilgrims Way) is the historical route supposed to have been taken by pilgrims from Winchester in Hampshire, England, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in Kent. This name, of comparatively recent coinage, is applied to a pre-existing ancient trackway dated by archaeological finds to 500–450 BC, but probably in existence since the stone age. The prehistoric route followed the "natural causeway" east to west on the southern slopes of the North Downs.

The course was dictated by the natural geography: it took advantage of the contours, avoided the sticky clay of the land below but also the thinner, overlying "clay with flints" of the summits. In places a coexisting ridgeway and terrace way can be identified; the route followed would have varied with the season, but it would not drop below the upper line of cultivation. The trackway ran the entire length of the North Downs, leading to and from Folkestone: the pilgrims would have had to turn away from it, north along the valley of the Great Stour near Chilham, to reach Canterbury.

The prehistoric trackway extended further than the present Way, providing a link from the narrowest part of the English Channel to the important religious complexes of Avebury and Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, where it is known as the Harroway. The route was still followed as an artery for through traffic in Roman times, a period of continuous use of more than 3000 years.

From Thomas Becket's canonization in 1173, until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, his shrine at Canterbury became the most important in the country, indeed "after Rome...the chief shrine in Christendom", and it drew pilgrims from far and wide. Winchester, apart from being an ecclesiastical centre in its own right (the shrine of St Swithin), was an important regional focus and an aggregation point for travellers arriving through the seaports on the south coast. Indeed, this was the route taken by Henry II on his pilgrimage of atonement for the death of Bishop Thomas from France To Canterbury in July 1174. Travellers from Winchester to Canterbury naturally used the ancient way, as it was the direct route, and research by local historians has provided much by way of detail—sometimes embellished—of the pilgrims' journeys. The numbers making their way to Canterbury by this route were not recorded, but the estimate by the Kentish historian William Coles Finch that it carried more than 100,000 pilgrims a year is surely an exaggeration. A separate (and more reliably attested) route to Canterbury from London was by way of Watling Street, as followed by the storytellers in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.