There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a grand adventure.
Not any more. Travel writers now come troubled and weary before they’ve even begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu d’esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate some trauma. It is almost as if, in today’s new puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks of the old nursery rhyme: ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.’
Recent bestselling examples of the genre have all followed the same principle: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found treated walking as necessary psychotherapy; Guy Stagg’s The Crossway was billed as ‘a journey to recovery’; while The Salt Path by Raynor Winn told of a couple escaping from eviction and illness.
Alistair Moffat has joined this party of burdened pilgrims. Nearly 70, he wants to face up to some ‘actuarial facts’, those he has wronged and mistakes he has made, so he ‘can change what is in my heart and soul’. To shrive himself, he decides to travel to Lindisfarne in the footsteps of Cuthbert, the great 7th-century saint of the north. This is admirable in its ambition, if at times dull in the execution, but suffers from one essential flaw. We know very little about St Cuthbert’s journey to Lindisfarne.
So Moffat has to do a great deal of supposition: what Cuthbert might have thought if he had once stood in the same place;whether he knew where his decision to become a monk might take him.
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