Recently I walked from Melide, a small town in northern Spain, to Santiago de Compostela – fifty kilometres of hills, dales and streams over three days, and part of a route that Christians have travelled since the ninth century. The relics of St James the Great, enshrined by the city’s cathedral, were rumoured in the Middle Ages to restore sick pilgrims to health, and many early pilgrims journeyed to the shrine (often from as far as Paris) in expectation of wondrous works. It still draws over half a million pilgrims per year, albeit for reasons quite different to those that inspired astounding displays of medieval piety. In 1985, a Belgian judge ordered pilgrimage to Santiago as punishment for the crimes of several youth offenders; more commonly, one undertakes the hike out of cultural interest, and as recompense for the guilty consumption of horrifyingly saline local tapas. Many of those who walk are non-Christians or non-religious people for whom the pilgrimage is as valuable as it is to Christians.

Pilgrimages are not interesting. That is, the popular view of pilgrimage does not suppose the desire to observe cultural or religious heritage as the primary motive for an arduous trek through hot, gorse-ridden countryside. Instead, pilgrimage is generally regarded as beyond the everyday, a rite of passage that might effect a spiritual change in the participant. It should stretch the soul before one’s intellect or hamstrings. This remains a cliché, even though most contemporary pilgrims would be hard-pressed to say that they are conscious of momentous events in their souls as they stop for a café con leche or Estella Galicia at one of the numerous bars along their route. A significant number would be even less likely to suggest that they are participating in a pilgrimage in order to bring about their own spiritual and moral salvation.

Yet all pilgrims, Christians and non-Christians, religious and non-religious, agree that a pilgrimage is more than its verbal description, strangely extraordinary, and of a different category to similar physical activities, such as climbing a mountain or running a marathon. It is in this understanding that pilgrimage is valuable for non-Christians. One chooses to make a pilgrimage, as opposed to running a marathon, in a society where ‘choice’ is esteemed above nearly all other ideals (European capitalist democracy holds up 'choice' as the highest political ideal); our culture of choice crowns one’s opting for a minority product. Chiefly, pilgrimage is pertinent to non-Christian and non-religious communities of secular nations because it involves the pilgrim in a tradition that pre-exists and will outlast cultures whose highest values are choice and secularism. One admits oneself into the history of a phenomenon common to every human civilisation; while many pilgrims walk the route to Santiago alone, their very walking opens the gates to historical communion.

The fact of the historical continuity and geographical ubiquity of pilgrimage stands upon concepts essential in Christianity and to non-Christians. Pilgrimages will happen as long as humans walk the earth; at the same time they are dependent on people repeatedly walking a specific route, often difficult for biological, geological or political reasons. Their existence is both certain and without guarantee. For Christians, participation is meaningful because of the certainty of life’s journey (there is an account of an emaciated and possessionless ‘perpetual pilgrim’ on the road to Santiago who, when asked where his pilgrimage was to end, replied, ‘In the cemetery’). Meanwhile, the fragility of the pilgrimage route is underpinned by universal fragility, all things being not of themselves stable, but dependent on God for their continued existence. As an atheist, pilgrimage is significant for me on contrary, yet equivalent, grounds: the journey is as important as the end-point of a pilgrimage.

During my walk, the most precious moments were those that gave the opportunity to share the experience with accompanying friends, and not my own arrival at Santiago. Pilgrimages are meaningful for me, too, as a manifestation of will and endeavour in the face of change – the biological, geological and political – as a bulwark against relativism and an assurance that people live beyond communities of difference, beyond the religious/non-religious divide. Neither the Spanish government nor an organisation conserves the hundreds of miles to the shrine of St James; the invasion of weeds and expansion of Santiago airport is checked by enlightened and ignorant pilgrims shimmering through the haze of fumes and oil.