Befell that, in that season on a day,
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury with devout coráge,
At night was come into that hostelry
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk, by áventure y-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all,
That toward Canterbury wouldë ride.

Can you walk from London to Canterbury in less than 48 hours? Maybe. Should you? Probably not. But I did.

Five of us set out on Friday evening from Southwark Cathedral with an optimistic plan.

  • Friday evening: 12 miles (19 km) to Bexleyheath
  • Saturday: 28 miles (45 km) to Sittingbourne
  • Sunday: 19 miles (31 km) to Canterbury

The downside to doing it in such a short time is that you’re forced to take a direct route that includes some quite unpleasant sections, like the part where you have to walk along a footpath separated only by a crash barrier from an eight-lane dual carriageway that is a motorway in every sense except the strict legal definition. I was glad that I had packed earplugs. And for some reason, almost every footpath alongside a busy road is on the north side, so you never get any shade from the trees.

There were good bits, though, when we walked along quiet shaded roads, along fields, and even through woods where I snacked on blackberries, plums, and cornelian cherries.

A path through a field, under some trees

One of the more pleasant parts of the walk

We rented a house for each night. On Friday, I ended up in the attic room which was initially hot, but tolerable after I opened the window for some air. In return I had a whole floor and an en-suite bathroom to myself.

On Saturday, however, the house that was advertised as having three beds and two sofa beds had only three beds and two sofas. I took some sofa cushions to the dining room, fashioned a comfortable bed for myself, and slept very well with a keffiyeh for a blanket. I slept so well, in fact, that I woke up at 03:30 feeling very refreshed before looking at my watch and going back to sleep for a bonus round. All the same, a proper bed would have been nice.

Walking boots were also a mistake. So much of the route was on tarmac – and what wasn’t was baked hard anyway – that running shoes would have been a better bet. Nonetheless, my feet survived with only one insignificant blister that didn’t even cause me discomfort.

The same couldn’t be said of my walking mates, all of whom suffered various difficulties with feet, legs, and exhaustion from the hubristic pace we had set ourselves. By Sunday morning, I was clearly in a much better condition than anyone else. Even before we walked from the house to the main road, the differences were becoming obvious between two of us at the front, and the three behind. They elected to find a train from Sittingbourne, while we pressed on.

However, they subsequently managed to walk a bit further and made it as far as Faversham, and the shrine of St Jude – who is, appropriately, the patron saint of lost causes – before taking a bus the last 10 miles. I don’t think that’s a failure: every depiction of historical pilgrims along the route shows them on horses or donkeys, and Chaucer’s pilgrims are described as riding. Doing it most of the way on foot in such short time was still a huge achievement.

Meanwhile, my remaining companion and I continued, he suffering with leg pains, I doing my best not to rush off ahead at my natural pace, and we made it to Canterbury together just after 16:00, in plenty of time for Evensong.

A milestone, marked Canterbury 2

Two miles to go

My feet were a little tender from being bashed against the hard ground for so long, but I arrived with no particular ill effects other than slightly stiff legs. By Monday evening, after a night of proper sleep, and an idle day with an afternoon nap, I felt almost completely back to normal. Is it from eating a plant-based diet? Is it from being fitter? (The fact that I cycled nearly 500 km a couple of weeks ago can’t have hurt.) Is it just that I weigh a lot less than anyone else and so it takes me less energy to move around? It is a strange feeling to have succeeded relatively easily at something that was such a challenge to others.

Nonetheless, I still feel that I achieved something significant, and unlike William of Perth I didn’t get murdered just past Rochester, so that’s nice.

We’ve also raised a significant amount for young people’s swimming in online and offline donations. The irony is that I don’t do that kind of swimming at all. I’ve never been able to master the technique of breathing while doing front crawl, because I lack the buoyancy and/or skill to keep my head above the water so that I can breathe.

We finally have fibre-optic internet at home again, five years after we last had it before we moved to these infrastructure-starved wild lands in inner London, less than 4 miles from Charing Cross. The engineer came and fitted the cable from the recently-installed box in the pavement to the front wall. It’s both faster and a bit cheaper than VDSL. I’ve gone with the cheapest tier (115 Mbps down) for now, because I wasn’t particularly dissatisfied with 58 Mbps before. It’s enough to download over a terabyte per day, and with the current AI-bubble-inflated cost of storage, who needs that much data?!

I’ve been hoarding links lately. Here they are: