To Santiago/A sort of pilgrimage:On an uneventful day's biking, Peter Murtaghtells of the rigours of former Santiago days and finds out what motivates the modern pilgrim.
On May 15th last, Jan and Jeanne Kolen closed the door of their home near Utrecht in the Netherlands, hoisted on to their backs two rucksacks weighing 20 and 17 kilos each, and began walking south.
They haven't stopped yet and don't expect to until about September 15th when they hope to be in Santiago de Compostela.
So why does a 21st century retired local government official and housewife whose children are raised decide to walk several thousand kilometres across Europe to the shrine of St James the Great, one of the Twelve Apostles.
Christian history has it that James was at the Last Supper, witnessed the Ascension of Christ after His crucifixion and shared the first Pentecost with Him. Later, James fell foul of the authorities and is said to have been put to the sword in Jerusalem by King Herod Agrippa in AD44.
On his way to meet his maker, James allegedly cured a paralysed man who was so enthused that he got up and walked with the saint. So startled was James's accuser, Josias, that he converted on the spot. This did not endear him to Herod who ran him through as well.
About 800 years after all this, James' remains are said to have been transported to Santiago de Compostela and entombed there.
So what can all this mean to Jan and Jeanne Kolen, two pilgrims Tony and I came upon on a stretch of the pilgrim route known as the Napoleonic Way a little south of Thiviers in Perigord?
"Are you very religious," I asked Jeanne, a slight, smiling woman who, like Jan, has a scallop shell, the pilgrims' symbol, on her rucksack.
"Religion?" she says and, throwing her head back and laughing, pronounces "de Boel". This is pronounced dee bull and is roughly the equivalent in English of "that's rubbish!"
Nicola Roberts, a solicitor and law lecturer from London who tired of her legal vocation and now runs a pretty two-star hotel, the Hotel de France et de Ruisse in Thiviers, describes two types of pilgrims.
There's the serious devotee for whom the pilgrimage is undertaken for purely religious reasons, alone or with maybe just one companion for company. Often ascetic types, they are happy to survive on not much more than water and fruit from the markets. They haggle over prices and seek the cheapest room, says Nicola.
"I don't know why we don't offer them a bed of nails in the shed," she jokes.
The other type, usually younger than the ascetics who are generally in their 50s or older, tend to travel in groups and walk a limited length of the route each year. They want lashings of coq au vin and locally produced beverage. For them, it seems, the pilgrimage is more about having a different type of holiday, perhaps with a dollop of spirituality thrown in.
At St James's Gate in Dublin, when Tony and I were getting our pilgrim passport (dispensed by Guinness on behalf of the Irish Society of the Friends of St James), the lady at reception said the number of applicants has been rising in recent years.
"A lot of young people," she says as she rubber-stamps our first scallop shell into our passports.
The stats do support claims of growing popularity. Records of the cathedral in Santiago show that in 1986, 2,491 pilgrims paid their respects. By 2006, the number had climbed to 100,377.
That's nothing to the Middle Ages, however. According to Roger Stalley, the Trinity historian, the number of pilgrims in the 15th century peak years were up to two million a year. A staggering number.
Many came by sea from Ireland - from Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, New Ross, Waterford, Youghal, Cork, Kinsale, Dingle, Limerick and Galway. Hospices to cater for ill pilgrims were built in Dublin and Drogheda.
The trip across the hazardous Bay of Biscay took them either to Bordeaux (often on wine ships returning empty to France) or to the Spanish fishing port of La Coruña. Conditions were often awful. In his essay, Sailing to Santiago, Stally quotes a vivid medieval poem in which the writer describes sleeping arrangements on deck: "For when that we shall go to bedde The pumpe was nygh our beddes hede, A man were as good to be dede As smell thereof the stynk."
Happily, the devotion of the contemporary pilgrim is not so tested.
Yesterday - an uneventful day's biking - we rode through several more wine-producing regions in Bergerac and near Bordeaux.
We passed near Sauternes and Monbazillac, regions of competing dessert wines. It is said that in medieval times while bishops drank Sauternes, the pope would settle for nothing less than Monbazillac.
Bikers had neither.