Philip Welsh enjoys an academic’s account of his life’s pilgrimages

NOW in his eighties, Charles Moseley is a former schoolmaster and don, prolific writer in the fields of medieval and early modern literature, and autobiographer.

In this beguiling memoir, he has brought together lively recollections of several key journeys on foot: an impulsive return to a hill known in childhood; the coast-to-coast walk; the first walk that he explicitly undertook as a pilgrimage, from his village home to Walsingham; a day’s riverside walk in Holy Week from Ely Cathedral to his home church, Little St Mary’s, Cambridge; and visits to Arran and Iona.

These are not contemporaneous records, but “about what those walks have come to mean, as I remember them”, as someone for whom “The presentness of the past is in all I see.” He draws richly on past voices, literary and antiquarian, but always as present companions.

He knows that he is a compulsive sharer of information (“Alas, being on my own I could not explain that to anyone”), and has an engaging line in free association: pondering Roman navigation as he walks past a tempting field of raspberries, his mind turns to the young Augustine’s apple-stealing, and then to his packed lunch — not on this occasion his wife’s peerless sandwiches, but the guilty delight of a bought sandwich with a free bag of crisps.

Woven through all of this is a strongly Anglican Catholic sensibility that instinctively draws on pre-Reformation sources and on the power of hallowed Anglican buildings to make that ancient faith real in the present. It is no surprise that Moseley cites cherished prayers and psalms in Latin, and habitually breaks into the Angelus at noon. He does, I fear, misrecollect the Anglican adage on confession — “All can, none must” — not, as he says, “many do” — “some should”.

Surfacing periodically amid his love of the countryside, richness of historical association, and self-deprecating humour, are shafts of the deeply felt purpose underlying this account of an avowedly restless Christian. “Lots of time, on these tracks . . . brooding on one’s guilts and failures.” “How do we learn to love more?” “All of us, it seems, are trying to avoid facing the mystery of suffering, death and resurrection being somehow complementary to each other, instead of learning to carry the burden of that knowledge patiently.”

He has a faux-distrait way with references — “What is it Tennyson says in Locksley Hall?” — and there is a teasing donnishness in the way he assumes that we know words such as parselenion, futhorc, and agger (some readers may need reminding of this term for the raised drainage base of a Roman road). But is “gnoma” really the correct plural for the pointers on sundials?

Crossroad is a delightful book by a devout man with a peculiarly well-stocked mind, whose lifetime of experience has brought him to be sure only that “the Story is too big for our little minds to grasp all at once . . . that radical doubt of all our temporary certainties is how we grow.”

The Story is bigger than this life. “Not everything matters. But some things matter immeasurably. Like that next journey, for which this and all the others have been a prelude.”

The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.

Crossroad: A pilgrimage of unknowing Charles Moseley DLT £20 (978-1-913657-86-4) Church Times Bookshop £18

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