Prologue

The first thing you need to understand about me is that, though I’m a Tennessean by birth and an American by citizenship, England is written into my DNA.

Indeed, I may have what some regard as the most boring DNA on ancestry.com. While most Americans like to brag about the exotic cocktail of nationalities in their heritage – French, Hungarian, a bit of Sephardic Jew, maybe even a little North African thrown in for spice – me? I’m 95 per cent British Isles. And the remaining 5 per cent represents my Viking ancestors who settled in England before the Conquest and my French Protestant (Huguenot) ancestors fleeing there from persecution under the Catholic Louis XIV.

Yep, I am definitely a product of my genetic history – a softer, flabbier, less-adventurous version of my ten-times-great-grandparents who landed at Jamestown in 1619. Whatever frontier spirit they possessed has, over four centuries, been diluted into a mild preference for English tea and a tendency to get winded on steep hills.

Oh, don’t let the name on the cover fool you. I acquired my Italian surname at age two when my dad adopted me, and although I love my dad to bits, I’ve always worn the name Juliano somewhat uncomfortably, like an ill-fitting Italian suit. And yes, I’m aware of the irony – Italian suits are supposed to be the finest in the world, perfectly tailored, exquisitely cut. But even the most expensive Italian suit won’t fit right if it wasn’t made for you. It’s not that I’m in any way embarrassed by my dad or my non-existent Italian heritage. It’s just not who I am. I’ve always thought Baskin-Brown – the surnames of my two maternal grandparents – would suit me better.

I once had a pastor friend tell me over lunch, ‘Juliano, you’ve got an English soul.’ I think that pretty much sums things up.

From the time I was little, while other kids were playing cops and robbers, I was lost in the Tales of King Arthur. The first big thing I ever saved up for as a teenager wasn’t a car or an expensive stereo system. It was a trip to England with my high school senior class. And that began what some might call an obsession.

I’ve been to England more times than I can count. I spent a year studying in Oxford and met my wife there – Alison, a proper English girl who somehow agreed to marry this Tennessee boy masquerading as a paisano. After we married, I served four years in the British Methodist Church in the Tamworth and Lichfield Circuit. Those were good years. Rich years. Years when I felt like I’d finally found where I belonged.

But nothing in this life lasts for ever.

We came to what Alison and I felt was the natural end of our time in Tamworth and Lichfield, so we started looking at other ministry settings. We loved to travel – we looked at the American Church in Paris, even considered Thailand. In the end, we decided we should return to the States for a while. Alison reasoned, ‘Let’s try it for a while and, if we don’t like it (we don’t have kids yet), we can always move somewhere else.’

Made sense.

Imagine my surprise when she announced there was only one of the fifty states she’d consider, and it was Florida.

Florida.

To me, on the other hand, ‘the States’ also meant only one state, and it was Tennessee. I was a Tennessean. My family had been in Tennessee since before it became the sixteenth state in 1796. I was born in the same county where my four-times-great-grandfather had settled more than two centuries earlier. Why would I possibly want to move to Florida?

Because it would make my young wife happy, that’s why. Now, before you nominate me for husband of the year, let me state for the record that I could’ve had a much better attitude about it.

So I got a job in Florida.

We came in 1996 and have been here ever since.

Twenty-nine years.

Sebring: Ambridge meets The Twilight Zone

It’s here that we built our family. Our three boys were all born in Orlando. We adopted three wonderful children from China. And I’ve spent the last twenty-nine years of my ministry in Florida. For the past eleven I have served the First Methodist Church of Sebring.

Sebring is a lovely little town – ‘City on the Circle’, it’s called. George Sebring of Sebring, Ohio, founded the church a year before he and his family incorporated the city. When we first moved to Sebring we were struck by several of its peculiarities, which led me to observe that Sebring is like a cross between Ambridge and The Twilight Zone.[1]

George Sebring deserves a moment, because he was one of those figures American small towns specialise in: a man of enormous ambition and no discernible interest in subtlety. The photographs show him bald, bespectacled and magnificently moustachioed – not a large man, but one who managed to look like he was about to sell you something and mean every word of it.

He was born in 1859 in Van Port, Pennsylvania, and the family moved to East Liverpool, Ohio, where at fourteen he left school, to his parents’ considerable displeasure, and apprenticed as a potter. Here is where it becomes interesting for our purposes. East Liverpool in those years called itself the Crockery City and, with rather more justification than such boasts usually carry, the Staffordshire of America. More than 200 potteries operated in and around the town. The whole industry had been started in 1839 by an English immigrant named James Bennett, who arrived with Staffordshire methods in his hands and then wrote home urging every potter he knew to join him. A great many did. And Bennett, who set the whole thing in motion, was a Derbyshire man.

George prospered. He and his brothers built a pottery firm, and in 1899 they laid out an entire town in Mahoning County to house it, which they named – and I want to stress that nobody obliged them to do this – Sebring, Ohio. Some years later, in failing health and wanting warmth, George sold the plant to his brother Ellsworth, moved south, and went fishing on a lake in the middle of Florida. He liked it. He bought the land around it. And in 1912 he founded a second town, which he named, after what I can only assume was long and careful deliberation, Sebring.

In fairness, the second Sebring was no vanity project. He laid it out on the plan of Heliopolis, the Greek city of the sun, streets radiating from a central park like spokes from a hub, which is why we are the City on the Circle and why the downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places. He also founded our church a year before he got round to incorporating the city, which tells you something about the man’s priorities and is the reason I have a job.

Most days Sebring is like Ambridge: a wonderful small-town feel, a strong sense of community, quaint and charming. Other days you catch a glimpse of The Twilight Zone. It’s remote, two hours from the nearest city of any kind. It runs on its own clock, one that has never once been hurried and doesn’t intend to start now. And then there are the snowbirds. Don’t forget the snowbirds.[2]

So, we’ve been here eleven years. It’s been wonderfully rich and rewarding. The church has loved our family through ups and downs, good times and bad… and vice versa.

In 2024 we marked ten years that I had been the pastor of First Sebring. That’s a big milestone. It’s the longest I’ve ever been in one place. Very few Methodist preachers ever stay in one place that long. And so it’s naturally a time to stop and reflect. You realise that you’re standing at a crossroads and you ask yourself questions like, ‘Is this where I’m supposed to be for the next ten years? Am I supposed to retire here?’

Added to my crossroads questioning, the church wasn’t in the most robust of positions. We had lots of challenges, and still do. I questioned whether any of the amazing accomplishments of the past ten years had any staying power or had made any lasting difference.

And that was just the church stuff.

Annus horribilis

Queen Elizabeth II famously described 1992 as her annus horribilis – a horrible year. Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson separated, Princess Anne divorced and Windsor Castle was gutted by fire. Now, to be clear, my wife didn’t divorce me and my house didn’t burn down. But 2023 to 2024 was rough, nonetheless.

There were personal challenges and disappointments. In the autumn of 2023, we had been contacted by a hugely popular home improvement show. They were coming to Sebring and wanted to renovate our hundred-year-old house at no cost to us. They strung us along for months saying, ‘It’s as good as happening,’ only to tell us days before the hosts of the TV show rolled into town, ‘We’ve decided to look at other stories.’

Then I experienced what I considered to be a very painful betrayal. I won’t go into details. But to be fair, my friend was dealing with some pretty difficult stuff and was probably in as bad a place as I was.

But the worst part of all was that my own stubborn and foolish pride had led to an estrangement between myself and my third son, Henry, who ironically was living in England at the time.

If you’d said to me in the summer of 2024, ‘David, tell me one area of your life that’s going really well,’ I probably couldn’t have told you a single thing. As we say back in Tennessee, I felt lower than a snake’s belly.

I opened up to my church leadership and shared my struggles. I told them I needed a sabbatical – that I had been their pastor for ten years, hadn’t had a sabbatical for twenty, and I just needed a break. Time to step away, reflect, renew and refresh.

God begins restoration

But then – slowly, quietly – God began putting things in place for my healing and restoration. In November 2024, Henry and I were reconciled. It turned out all that was needed was for me to swallow my foolish pride, to set aside my pathological need to be right all the time and to acknowledge that I was operating under the delusion that it was better to be right than reconciled. What my son really needed wasn’t a perfect dad who was right all the time, but an imperfect dad who loved him unconditionally and had the courage to admit when he was wrong.

When we finally saw each other face to face six months later, stopped trying to fix things through strained FaceTime calls and carefully worded texts, and were just… present with each other… that’s when the real healing began.

While all this was going on, something interesting had happened. My first idea for a sabbatical had been considerably less strenuous: I’d been talking with friends in the Methodist Church in the Bahamas about preaching on Sundays and doing a whole lot of nothing the other six days – paradise, a mere 350 miles or so from my front door. That plan died quietly before it ever reached the board. Apparently, God had something else in mind, roughly 4,000 miles further away.

Because around that time, something unexpected popped up on my social media feed. Unexpected to me, at any rate. Nothing arrives on your feed by chance any more – somewhere an algorithm had been reading my mail, listening in on my private conversations and drawing its own conclusions about the state of me. But one day I saw something called the Peak Wesley Way.

Now, I’m not what you’d call an outdoorsy person. In fact, the only exercise I get is jumping to conclusions. But this… this was different. A six-day, forty-seven-mile pilgrimage through the Peak District of Derbyshire, connected by six quaint little Methodist chapels where John Wesley and his ‘helpers’ had preached.

‘If I ever get a sabbatical,’ I thought, ‘I want to do that!’

By the time I put my sabbatical proposal to my board in January 2025, that thought had become the plan: I would walk the Peak Wesley Way.

In January 2025, my church approved the sabbatical. Not only approved it – they got behind it with enthusiasm and generosity that still moves me. Several people cheered me on. Several offered to walk with me. One guy, Dave – a hardcore outdoorsman who wasn’t satisfied that my new, fancy, designer walking boots were good enough – bought me an amazing pair of proper hiking boots.

They also agreed to cover the expenses of my friend, coach and mentor, the Rev Dr Jorge Acevedo (pronounced ‘George’), so that he could make the pilgrimage with me. And maybe most importantly, my wife, Alison, gifted me with time away from the family without worrying about the kids’ needs for a couple of weeks.

Solvitur ambulando

From January 2025 onward, I prepared. I walked. I read. I prayed.

Two books were particularly helpful: Mark Buchanan’s God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul and J F Penn’s Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways.[3] Both reminded me of a Latin phrase I’d first heard from St Augustine which became aspirational, almost a mantra: Solvitur ambulando.

It is solved by walking.

Those early Church fathers and mothers understood something we’ve largely forgotten: that the rhythm of walking, the steady pace of one foot in front of the other, has a way of untangling the knots in our souls. Problems that seem insurmountable while sitting at a desk become manageable when you’re moving through the world at three miles per hour. Grief that feels crushing in a chair becomes bearable when you’re climbing a hill. Questions that have no answers in the abstract sometimes resolve themselves when you’re watching your feet find the path.

Solvitur ambulando.

So, on 27th May 2025, Jorge and I boarded a plane to London. We met Henry there – that reconciliation still fresh, still precious – and on 31st May we began walking. What follows is the story of those six days, forty-seven miles, and the edges we walked – literal and metaphorical – through the Peak District of Derbyshire. It’s a story about blisters and beauty, about gleaming white cement works and twenty-year-old communist revolutionaries, about Methodist chapels and the kindness of strangers who immediately became friends, about what endures and what doesn’t, about rights of way both legal and spiritual.

But mostly, it’s a story about what happens when you take your broken self to the hills and just start walking.

Solvitur ambulando.

1

Matlock to Youlgrave

The ant in the cereal bowl

Day One: 9.4 miles

I had always remembered Matlock fondly. Three decades previously, when Alison and I were newlyweds navigating the mysteries of married life, we’d made a trip here to buy Denby dishes at the factory store – the kind of practical, slightly romantic expedition young couples undertake when everything still feels like an adventure. I remembered the town sitting in its bowl of hills, charming in that particular English way where everything looks like it’s been there forever – and probably has.

Matlock sits in the Derwent Valley in the Peak District, its name derived from Old English: mæthel (assembly) and āc (oak tree) – literally ‘moot-oak’, a tree where meetings were held. For most of its existence it was an unremarkable collection of villages until thermal springs were discovered there in 1698, when it became a modest spa town. But it was during the Victorian era – specifically in the 1840s – when the hydropathy craze truly took hold and transformed Matlock into a fashionable destination. Cold water was used to expel poisons from the body, sweating would purge impurities; and since it was all about promoting a healthy lifestyle, drugs, alcohol and rich food were strictly forbidden.

Enter John Smedley, born in 1803, a successful textile manufacturer from nearby Lea Bridge who became seriously ill on his honeymoon in Switzerland in 1847. After recovering through hydropathic treatment at Ben Rhydding in Yorkshire, Smedley became a zealous convert. He wasn’t the first to recognise the commercial potential of the water cure – Matlock Bath, two miles south, had been a spa town of some elegance for a century – but it was Smedley whose conviction and enterprise made Matlock one of the most celebrated centres of hydropathy in the world.

Smedley experimented with hydropathic remedies on his own mill workers (one wonders if they had much choice in the matter) and concluded that the traditional cold-water cure was ‘too severe for invalids’.[4] He pioneered a ‘mild water cure’,[5] using water heated to 80°F (26.6°C), wrote a manual called Practical Hydropathy, and in 1853 acquired a modest property on Matlock Bank – a small house, by his own account, able to take six or eight patients. It did not stay modest. By 1867 he had replaced it with a castellated block of four storeys and eleven bays, and the hydro was treating some 2,000 patients a year. It went on growing long after him: an eastern wing by the Nottingham architect George Statham in the mid-1880s, a boiler house and a chimney like an Italian campanile in 1894, a domed glass Winter Garden with a ballroom in 1901. By 1939, Smedley’s Hydro was world famous, its guest list reading like a Who’s Who of British cultural life: Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Beecham, Ivor Novello. The massive building that still dominates Matlock Bank today – now housing Derbyshire County Council – is the accumulated result of all of it. Alcohol was strictly forbidden (though apparently many guests sent out for it from local pubs), and religious observance was compulsory.

But here’s where Smedley’s character gets interesting. This man, who preached renunciation of ‘all extravagances and frivolity’[6] and subjected his guests to austere religious services, also built himself Riber Castle – a flamboyant Gothic folly with four castellated corner towers perched 850 feet above Matlock on Riber Hill. Local legend has it that it was ‘planned, reared, finished and occupied in four months and one week’,[7] which, if true, is a stunning achievement given that enormous blocks of gritstone had to be hauled up a one-in-five gradient on roads that were little more than farm tracks.

The castle became known locally as ‘Smedley’s Folly’, and for good reason: the man built a twenty-bedroom mansion on a hilltop and apparently didn’t think through how to get water to the summit. The irony of a hydropathy magnate constructing a home without a reliable water supply is almost too perfect. The problem wasn’t solved until the Matlock Water Company built reservoirs in the 1860s and 1880s to serve the growing number of hydros on Matlock Bank. Smedley died in 1874; his wife, Caroline, continued living at Riber until her death in 1892. The castle has had a varied and colourful career since that time: prep school, wartime food storage, decades as a wildlife park, and currently sitting semi-restored as a Grade II listed ruin awaiting conversion to luxury apartments.

So this was Matlock – a town built on the Victorian conviction that water could cure everything, dominated by the legacy of a complicated man who was equal parts philanthropist, entrepreneur and eccentric. The hydropathy business died with the advent of the NHS in 1947 (turns out people preferred free medical treatment to expensive unproven therapies), but the buildings remain, monuments to an age when the wealthy came by train to take the waters and sweat out their demons.

An ant in a cereal bowl

When we arrived on that Friday evening in late May 2025, the Duke of Wellington sat at the top of a steep hill overlooking Matlock. An Uber deposited us – me, Jorge and my son Henry – in the pub’s car park. A cheerful landlord emerged, handed me keys and pointed us towards the outbuilding behind the pub that had been converted into guest rooms. We dropped our bags, freshened up and headed back for dinner.

The landlord had thoughtfully reserved us a table in the dining room, but we opted for the bar instead. Jorge, who doesn’t drink alcohol, might have been the only person in Matlock’s history who could have survived one of Smedley’s austere hydros without sneaking out for contraband gin. After a pleasant dinner, he left Henry and me to our pints and went to bed. We stayed.

And stayed.

We’d become thoroughly absorbed in conversation with the locals. Through the pub windows, Riber Castle loomed on the opposite side of the valley, Smedley’s Folly keeping watch over the town from its hilltop perch. We talked about football (that’s soccer for the Americans reading this), about sunburns acquired on Florida holidays, about the things strangers discover they have in common when alcohol and good humour are flowing. This was us making up for lost time. As mentioned previously, Henry and I had spent most of 2024 estranged, and the reconciliation was still fresh and fragile. This – pints in a Peak District pub with my son – felt like the thing I’d been afraid I’d lost forever. And here it was, improbably, impossibly: us, together, laughing.

We shuffled off to bed sometime after midnight, ready for whatever adventure lay ahead.

Morning arrived with all the subtlety of a freight train. Breakfast was served by a sullen, spotty teenage boy. He moved through the dining room like someone personally offended by our decision to eat breakfast – or possibly by the existence of mornings in general. I tried to be cheerful. It didn’t help. He delivered eggs and toast with the warmth of a traffic warden issuing a ticket.

We gathered our things and made our way to the car park where we’d agreed to meet Rev Julie Letts, the Methodist Circuit superintendent, and her husband, Malcolm. I’d been exchanging emails with Julie for weeks and it felt as though we were already friends. We spotted one another (it was only a small car park) and recognised each other immediately. After exchanging enthusiastic hellos and hugs, she said she’d worn her clerical collar so I’d recognise her. As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. There was something about the warmth radiating from her, the openness of her manner, that made her unmistakable.

Julie was exactly as I’d imagined from our correspondence: white hair, kind eyes, that clerical collar and a smile that put you at ease instantly. Malcolm stood beside her – weathered, capable looking, dressed for the outdoors. They later explained they had met while working together at a bank. Julie had subsequently become a Methodist minister, while Malcolm had retired from banking and now enjoyed supporting her ministry and helping pilgrims like us navigate the Peak Wesley Way.

‘You found us!’ Julie said, as if there’d been any doubt. She introduced Malcolm, who had our bags in the boot before I’d finished shaking his hand.

Before we set off, Julie looked at us with a smile I would later recognise as slightly mischievous. ‘Would you like us to take your bags and drop them at Youlgrave chapel for you?’

A word about the spelling of the name, because the village itself can’t quite decide. The road signs at either end say Youlgrave, which is how the Parish Council spells it, how the locals say it and how the sign outside the parish church has it. The sign out at the main road, however, says Youlgreave, which is how the County Council and the Ordnance Survey insist on it. And a signpost a few miles to the south-west offers a third option – Youlegreave – that nobody at all appears to want. The Domesday Book of 1086 called it Giolgrave and valued it at sixteen shillings. A local schoolteacher named Bill Shimwell later traced more than sixty recorded spellings, including Jalgrave, Yelgreve and the frankly heroic Hyolegrave.[8]

This, dear reader, is one of the ten thousand things I love about England. This is a country where you’re quietly judged on whether you pronounce Shrewsbury correctly (and yes, you just said it the ‘right’ way in your head, didn’t you?), where ordering a Bakewell tart in Bakewell marks you as a tourist who doesn’t know it’s a pudding, and where a village of a thousand souls can sustain a three-way disagreement about its own name for centuries without anyone feeling the slightest need to resolve it. Americans would have formed a committee, held a referendum and repainted the signs by Tuesday. The English simply let all three stand, secure in the knowledge that everyone who matters knows which one is correct. Alexander Pope had it exactly: ‘What mighty contests rise from trivial things.’[9] He was writing about a stolen lock of hair, but he could just as easily have been standing at the A6 turning, looking at a road sign.

Back to the offer to transport our bags. I blinked. The website had explicitly said, ‘We’re sorry but we cannot offer baggage transfer service.’[10] I had resigned myself to carrying a thirty-pound pack for six days, which filled me with a quiet dread I hadn’t fully acknowledged.

‘That would be… yes. Yes, please.’

‘We’ll make sure someone transports them for you every day,’ Malcolm added, already reaching for Jorge’s pack.

Methodist angels. I don’t know how we would have made it without them.

With our heavy packs safely loaded into their car, all I had to carry was my small rucksack with daily provisions. It still turned out to be brutal at times, but I genuinely don’t think I would have survived with that full pack.

Julie and Malcolm drove us down to Matlock Station where the trail officially began. The station itself was lovely – Victorian stone and ironwork, largely unaltered since Joseph Paxton (head gardener at Chatsworth and architect of the Crystal Palace) had a hand in its design. Julie gathered us together, placed her hands on our shoulders and prayed for us – for safety, for companionship, for whatever healing we were seeking on this journey. It was simple and sincere, and standing there in the morning light with the station behind us and the Peak District ahead, I felt that dangerous, beautiful and fragile thing: hope.

‘Off you go, then,’ she said, squeezing my shoulder. ‘See you in Youlgrave.’

But not before stopping at the supermarket between the station and the trail. Pilgrimages don’t actually begin with grand gestures and spiritual epiphanies – they begin with meal deals and chocolate bars. We stocked up: sandwiches, crisps, bottles of water and a quantity of Dairy Milk that suggested we were provisioning for a siege. The essentials.

At the official starting point – a post marking where the Limestone Way meets the Peak Wesley Way – we paused for a photo. Henry and Jorge flanked me, all of us grinning like we knew what we were doing. I was wearing a grey T-shirt I’d bought specifically for this journey. It said Solvitur Ambulando in gold letters. The phrase had lodged itself in my brain like a question I desperately wanted to answer in the affirmative.

Could it be solved through walking? The burnout, the pastoral exhaustion, the feeling that I’d somehow lost the thread of my own life?

I looked at the green hills looming large around us – straight up, no mercy – at my son standing beside me, at Jorge with his walking stick already adopting what I would soon recognise as his signature move.

‘Mr Wesley!’ Jorge announced in a voice that sounded disturbingly like the old Looney Tunes cartoon, Foghorn Leghorn. ‘The Peak Wesley Way!’

Henry and I looked at each other.

‘Is he going to do that the whole time?’ Henry asked.

As it turned out: yes. Every single time we spotted a green trail marker for the next six days, Jorge would announce it in that cartoon rooster voice. It was endearing and maddening in equal measure.

There was only one way to find out if walking could solve anything.

We started walking.

The first thing you need to understand about Matlock, as mentioned earlier, is that it sits in a bowl. This is charming when you’re looking at it from above. It’s considerably less charming when you realise that to get anywhere, you have to climb out of that bowl.

The ascent began almost immediately. What had looked like gentle rolling hills from the Duke of Wellington revealed itself to be a relentless upward grind. Within ten minutes, my legs were protesting. Within twenty, I was cast back to a morning several weeks earlier, standing at my kitchen sink loading breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. I’d looked down and noticed an ant in the bottom of one of the kids’ cereal bowls, lapping up leftover milk. It kept trying to climb out – scrambling up the slick sides, sliding back, trying again with what seemed like Herculean effort. Eventually it made it to the rim. I watched it crawl to freedom across the counter, then flipped on the garbage disposal and forgot about it. That’s what I felt like now: an ant in a cereal bowl, all desperate scrambling and not much progress, the futility of the effort just starting to dawn on me.

It wasn’t my feet that bothered me, surprisingly. Despite chronic pain in both feet – plantar fasciitis, neuropathy and a neuroma in my right foot that usually made walking miserable – my feet were holding up thanks to some rather expensive insoles I’d purchased beforehand and the wonderful hiking boots that had been gifted to me by Dave. No, it was my legs and shins that let me know very quickly I was in for a challenge. Every step felt like negotiation: can we keep going? Do we have to? What if we just stopped right here?

We didn’t say much to each other during that first climb. Jorge was ahead, setting a steady pace with his walking stick. Henry was beside me, matching my slower rhythm. I was too breathless for conversation, too focused on just keeping my legs moving. The path led us through gates and over squeeze stiles – those distinctly English contraptions designed to let humans through while keeping sheep contained. The guidebook had promised we’d witness ‘some fine views of the glorious Derbyshire countryside including some well-known rock features’. What it hadn’t mentioned was that you had to earn those views with your thighs screaming.

Eventually – though it felt like hours – we crested the hill and found a bench. We collapsed onto it with the grace of felled timber.

For a few minutes, none of us spoke. We just sat there, huffing and puffing, our legs trembling with the effort. Then I looked up and saw what we’d climbed for.

Matlock spread out below us in its bowl – stone buildings clustered together, the River Derwent winding through green hills rising on all sides. Even under that morning’s cloudy skies, it was beautiful. The kind of view that makes you think maybe the pain was worth it. Maybe this leads somewhere.

I didn’t say anything profound in that moment. I don’t think any of us did. We pulled out the chocolate we’d purchased at the supermarket – melted slightly but still glorious – and sat there chewing in exhausted silence. Jorge made mention of Mr Wesley again in his best Foghorn Leghorn impersonation. Henry probably mentioned being hungry despite having just eaten chocolate. We just sat there, grateful for the bench, looking at what we’d left behind.

The guidebook mentioned something called the Hermitage along this section – a spot where, apparently, a hermit had once practised a life of service, trusting that his giving would be reciprocated. There was a reflection question in the margin: ‘Where is trust in your life?’ I thought about that as we sat on the bench. Coming on this pilgrimage was an act of trust, wasn’t it? Trusting that walking could solve something. Trusting Jorge to see me at my weakest and not judge. Trusting Henry to keep showing up. Trusting Julie and Malcolm to transport our bags. Trusting my body not to completely betray me. Trusting that the pain would lead somewhere worth going to.

On pilgrimage, you have to put your trust in your fellow pilgrims. The hermit knew that. Maybe Augustine knew it too when he said solvitur ambulando. Maybe it’s not solved by walking so much as solved through walking together.

We got up and kept walking...

[1] For my American readers: Ambridge is the fictional village at the heart of The Archers, the BBC radio soap that has been running since 1951 – picture Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show, with more sheep and fewer orange groves.

[2] For those unfamiliar with this uniquely American phenomenon, imagine if every person over the age of seventy in Yorkshire suddenly decided to spend November to March in Cornwall, driving enormous caravans at a glacial pace, dining at half past four and loudly wondering why everything isn’t exactly like it is back in Yorkshire. That’s a snowbird.

[3] Mark Buchanan, God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020); J F Penn, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways (Bath: Curl Up

Press, 2023).

[4] Matlock Civic Association, ‘John Smedley and the Rise and Fall of Hydropathy’, www.matlockcivicassociation.org.uk/john-smedley-and-the-rise-fall-of-hydropathy (accessed 6th July 2026).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Matlock Town Council, ‘A Brief History of Matlock’, www.matlock.gov.uk/a-brief-history-of-matlock (accessed 6th July 2026).

[8] Official Youlgrave Parish Website, www.youlgrave.org.uk (accessed 6th July 2026).

[9] Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712), Canto I, line 2.

[10] ‘Peak Wesley Way’, www.peakwesleyway.com/pilgrimage/peak-wesley-way (accessed 21st July 2026). It did say this on the website when I booked the pilgrimage for Jorge and myself, but subsequent to our walk they changed their policy and now offer baggage transfer service! I guess we were trailblazers!