I went on medieval England’s great forgotten pilgrimage

It was deep in the Clent Hills (near junction 3 on the M5, south of the Harvester and the Premier Inn) that the miracle took place.

The story went like this. Kenelm was a young boy who had inherited the throne of Mercia when he set out on a hunting trip to the Worcestershire forests. Kenelm was out hunting stags: but it soon transpired someone was hunting him. His sister coveted the throne and sent her lover to slay the young boy. The assassin raised his sword as the child sang a hymn (for Kenelm had already foreseen his fate). Kenelm’s head fell to the forest floor, but his soul took flight in the form of a dove. That dove soared from the West Midlands to the west bank of the Tiber, carrying a scroll, to inform the Pope of Kenelm’s martyrdom. A new saint was declared.

Martyred in the 8th or maybe the 9th century AD, Kenelm became one of the most famous English saints. According to one medieval historian, his shrine was the most visited in all the land: his name was invoked by Chaucer’s pilgrims. For centuries, it seemed, this young boy was a guiding light for a young kingdom: a saint the newly unified England could call its own. I spent three days following St Kenelm’s Trail, tracing the route along which his earthly remains were carried, from the outskirts of Birmingham to the edge of the Cotswolds. Whenever I mentioned his name to modern residents of Mercia, the answer I generally got was something like: “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

A place ‘which speaks of eternity’

The fog hung thickly about the slopes of the Clent Hills. My watch showed noon, but down in the woods the light was as weak as dusk.

Beech trees lurched from fog as I walked, vanishing behind my back just a few strides later. This National Trust woodland was a surviving fragment of the hunting forests of Mercia, now partly lost to the suburbs and business parks of the West Midlands conurbation. On a clear day you could look out towards Birmingham from its high points and try to spot the BT Tower, or maybe Cadbury’s World. But this was not a clear day. Instead you could imagine yourself in the days of Anglo-Saxon thegns (lords), listening out for a huntsman’s horn.

At the forest’s edge a church appeared. Carved into the lych gate was the figure of a boy, locks of hair escaping from beneath his crown. Standing in the porch was a young vicar with polished shoes and a trench coat.

“There is almost a time warp here,” the Reverend Christopher Henson told me. “You are encountering somewhere which speaks of eternity.”

Reverend Christopher became vicar of St Kenelm’s, Romsley last October. He showed me around the handsome church: its Victorian stained glass windows showed a teenage Kenelm with fair hair. An icon on the altar showed the saint looking younger and more serious, with dark hair. Reverend Christopher lamented that the elderly parishioners who knew the legend of Kenelm had mostly passed on – but insisted the saint’s martyrdom still contained lessons for Christians today.

“His story echoes in my heart when I see injustice around the world. I have great faith that a miracle took place there. How it came to be I don’t know: I just trust in God that something happened.”

The precise location of this miracle lay just outside the church. Rolling up his socks, Reverend Christopher led me down a steep, muddy path into an overgrown ravine, parting nettles to reach a little spring. A plaque explained that these waters miraculously burst forth on the spot where Kenelm was killed. Neo-pagans had tied windchimes to a hawthorn tree nearby (other offerings were periodically found here, such as teddy bears).

We stopped for a while, listening to the whoosh of the M5 in the distance. Reverend Christopher lamented that, since the late 1990s, the spring has been inaccessible to many: the boardwalk around it had rotted, and nails were protruding. It would not pass a risk assessment for a school trip. With £20,000 of funding the site could be restored, he said – baptisms might even be performed here. Most of all, Reverend Christopher hoped this unique feature might save his church in a time of declining attendance.

“There is a risk that this church could one day shut,” he said. “I don’t want to be the one that closes its doors. We must hold fast onto those things that are mysterious, but also tangible. That exercise of taking the remains of Kenelm to Winchcombe Abbey – there must be truth in that too.”

From West Midlands to West Country

Heavy rail fell as I set out on the St Kenelm’s Trail, leaving behind the commuter villages for the Worcestershire fields beyond. Occasionally the rains relented, and the long spine of the Malvern Hills rose in the distance among electricity pylons and half-rainbows. But mostly my eyes were trained to the ground – the manure-crusted country lanes, the canal towpaths bumpy with roots, where anglers grudgingly shifted their rods so I could pass.

The story of St Kenelm has many versions – like many saints, he is a figure glimpsed in fragments, as though half-remembered from a dream. Similarly the precise route along which monks carried his body to its resting place at Winchcombe is lost to history. Two long-distance paths reimagining this journey were simultaneously plotted in 2003 – the St Kenelm’s Trail by John Price, the St Kenelm’s Way by the late Gerry Stewart – both oblivious of what the other was up to. Price told me over the phone that he wanted to replicate the feel of the Camino, after walking that famous Spanish path.

On my second day there was an amber weather warning for rain – to beat the storms I switched to travelling by bicycle, following the trail where I could, or shadowing it nearby. I watched the West Midlands slowly shade into the West Country. In the wayside villages, tiled roofs and red brick became displaced by thatch and biscuity Cotswold stone. In the pubs and shops the Black Country yow and yam lapsed into a cidery burr. Soon after crossing a muddy-brown Avon, I looked up from an orchard pungent with rotting apples. Above was the Cotswold escarpment, its flanks shaggy with oak woods. I understood I was close to my journey’s end.

The town of Winchcombe became famous one February night in 2021. A chunk of a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars landed outside a family home, close to three guinea pigs named Nutmeg, Ted and Parsnip. Nasa had spent a billion dollars retrieving similar material from outer space: in suburban Gloucestershire it had turned up on a driveway at no cost. But there was another time when Winchcombe was home to priceless objects supposedly connected to the heavens.

From the centre of the town, a country lane wound up the scarp. In good weather, people scaled these heights for far-reaching views of Bredon Hill and the Welsh mountains rising beyond the Severn. Few paid attention to a small Victorian structure in a farmer’s field, ringed by blackberry bushes, with an iron door handle shaped like a six-pointed star. Drawing closer to it, I saw a figure carved in stone above the doorway, flowing locks escaping beneath a crown.

Winchcombe was a royal centre of Mercia, its abbey was the natural place for St Kenelm’s remains to be interred. During the English Reformation his relics and the abbey were destroyed – Kenelm’s legend began to fade from memory. Today this little building, which houses a second St Kenelm’s Well, provides an echo of those medieval days when countless pilgrims came seeking miracles. Inside there is a pool of glass-clear water, a veil of cobwebs up in the rafters, and an explanation that this spring had supposedly appeared in the spot where the coffin bearers rested on the last leg into Winchcombe.

One of its few regular visitors was Byron Hadley, an undertaker from nearby Northleach, who knew what it felt like to carry the weight of the departed on his shoulders. He had heard the story of Kenelm when he was a boy, and since 2018 had helped organise an annual pilgrimage to what he sincerely believed were healing waters – while rescuing the saint from what he called “the dustbin of history.”

“I feel his spirit is there, guiding me.” he told me on the phone. “Every day he is not far from my thoughts. Kenelm had a child-like faith. And maybe we all need to revert to being children – to believe wholeheartedly, not to question as adults do, but to accept what we read in the Bible.”

I sat for a while, listening to the hush of gently running water. A wood pigeon took flight nearby as I closed the door behind me and strode homeward across the Gloucestershire fields. Byron was frank that only about 50 people came on the annual pilgrimage. But, then again, in the 1970s only a few dozen people had walked the Camino, and in 2023 half a million pilgrims came. Long dormant things could sometimes bubble up to the surface, resurgent like a spring in spate.

How to do it

The St Kenelm’s Trail (60 miles) and St Kenelm’s Way (55 miles) share the same starting and finishing points – both are relatively easy to access. The nearest mainline station to St Kenelm’s in the Clent Hills is Hagley, from there it’s a pleasant hour’s walk through the woods to the church.

At the other end, Winchcombe is not served by mainline trains, but it is however reachable by the heritage trains of the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway (gwsr.com), which take 20 minutes to chuff to Cheltenham Race Course Station on the edge of town. Timetables can, however, make this challenging  – unromantic souls may just want to catch bus W, which leads from Winchcombe to the centre of the handsome spa town and its own mainline station.

The Way is more direct than the more meandering Trail, though both converge at certain points. Accommodation can be scarce along both paths – you will find some options in Droitwich, Upton Snodsbury and in Pershore. An enduring favourite at the finishing line is the Lion Inn in Winchcombe, a 15th-century coaching inn that would have been in business in those years when pilgrims came from afar (from £131).

For more information on walking both paths see the British Pilgrimage Trust website (britishpilgrimage.org). Look out for John Price’s own website, which has information on the paths plotted by himself and the late Gerry Stewart, plus information on the life and afterlife of St Kenelm himself.

On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain by Oliver Smith is published by Bloomsbury Continuum