Hugh’s Way

We were discussing money on Lincoln Cathedral Council. To be honest, I find long presentations on finances by accountants boring and fairly incomprehensible. But of course cathedrals are always short of money, though Lincoln is better run than most. But a thought occurred to me. Here we have the Shrine of Saint Hugh. In the Middle Ages it was a major centre of pilgrimage. People walked to here from all over Europe. Yet not one in a thousand people have ever heard of it. Thirty years ago a tiny trickle of people walked the Route of St James of Compostela in northern Spain. Now it is 300,000 a year. Even in France as we saw this summer every small town on the St Jacques “routes” are marketing themselves. Here nothing. Could we not recreate a pilgrimage route from London to Lincoln? Are there country villages and churches that we speed by on the motorway. Walsingham, destroyed in 1539, reborn again because of the vision of one Anglican priest in the 1920s, Father Hope Patten. Is there hope for Hugh?