Shut now to locations I walked via final yr. A glimpse of riverside willows racing previous the automobile’s window, then the Puente Santa Maria. A yr gone in a flash, just like the swallows skimming the highway forward. Too quickly they’ll go away, towing the desires of summer season south.
Time dashing up even because it counts down. Summers’ shortening, gone just like the bluebirds. Leaving us with our Celtic quandary – that of souls riven by a deep love of dwelling and but the necessity to wander. Although generally it seems like we’ve been solid out into the evening and left to seek out our manner dwelling once more, with solely star fields to information us or whispered prayers borne on the wind, flayed from the lips of poets with anguished hearts. Or maybe the phrases of untamed males in coarse clothes, consumed honey cake and desert silence, leaving a crumb right here, there.
However as we drive into Pontearnelas, there’s a niche within the clouds and a trick of the sunshine. Slanted sunbeams falling on three pilgrims tip-tapping their manner throughout a cobblestone bridge, backpacks and scallop shells flapping, having ventured out from someplace east of Eden, course set for Compostela (a subject of stars) – to catch one falling maybe.
And for a second, every thing slows, merges into one – as if this place passes via them, reasonably than they via it.
Is that the distinction between vacationer and pilgrim? Not skimming over the floor however immersed so deeply in a panorama that a few of it lodges and by no means falls away? Is that how a reputation on a map turns into a spot within the coronary heart? Drawing one again.
As we move, I hear John O’Donohue whisper, ‘Hearken to the brand new silence introduced with them.’ These hearts made stressed – every step scattering songlines via the land of their sojourn.
If one spent a lifetime wandering these paths, treading softly on the desires of pilgrims previous, it wouldn’t be a waste.
My information, Alfonso, returned to North-West Spain after a while in Belfast factors proper. ‘Take a look at that.’
Sudden shapes in all places, as swallows and martins burst out, shot from God is aware of the place flashing previous on feeding runs earlier than their lengthy migration.
Simply after Pontearnelas, the highway winds uphill. An indication for Mouzos and the Chapel of San Pedro – the place the village welcomes weary walkers.
A person slowly rises from the porch, leaning closely on his stick. Don Jose blinks as I shake his hand. One other man joins him, his son Jaime, who constructed the chapel.
‘Earlier than they’d a scallop shell stamp,’ Alfonso explains, Don Jose would plant his now decommissioned stick in ink to stamp the pilgrims’ passports.
A Camellia tree shades the porch, symbolising the Divine, the promise of Spring, and Winter’s passing. Beside it on the wall, a plaque information the chapel’s opening in 1978, the yr of the brand new structure, of the approaching once more of a democratic Spring to Spain. Conditional on the flawed however obligatory pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting wrongs, however solely these meted out to Franco’s victims. Their remembrance for many years, shrouded in silence till the millenia’s flip and the beginnings of the restoration of historic reminiscence.
Jaime constructed the chapel as a tribute to his father’s era, regardless of the village’s declining inhabitants as youngsters sought new alternatives or bought their fields and moved away. The lot of rural communities in all places, this lack of a particular connection to the land.
‘Then, three years in the past,’ Alfonso tells me, ‘Don Jose, Jaime and others lobbied for the Camino path to undergo the village. The mayor later informed me it was the one subject they ever sought a gathering on.’
And it introduced new life. Few in Mouzos had travelled extensively, however now the world walks by their entrance doorways, alongside laneways, via farmyards and vineyards. Then out and in of the chapel of San Pedro, the place greetings, drinks, and fruit are shared by ageing patriarchs, cheered by the movement of latest pilgrim generations, with their tales of appreciation of the land’s magnificence. They stroll on to Santiago however by no means actually arrive, then journey dwelling however by no means actually return. None of us do.
I sit awhile within the cool of the white-walled pine-clad little chapel dressed with white carnations on a easy altar.
I don’t wish to go, however I’ve a late afternoon flight.
Yet another cease on the best way with Manolo.
‘He has some wine to offer me,’ Alfonso says.
I attain out to shake Manolo’s red-stained hand.
‘Take as a lot as you need. I’ve to make a contemporary batch of Barrantes wine. It has a full style. No chemical substances or preservatives added.’
We pattern it. He’s proper. We pattern once more – simply to ensure.
‘Clean, full-bodied,’ I say.
‘Sure, however not as sturdy as Albariño. You need to cease driving, put your ft up and revel in a bottle.’
‘But when I do this, I’ll miss my flight.’
He smiles and says, ‘Then it’s essential to come again.’
Roy Uprichard is a retired instructor who has printed three ‘Camino kind’ memoirs:
- On (and off) The Portuguese Means. Celtic Connections – Galicia, Eire and In all places.(2021)
- Stone and Water – Strolling the Variante route of the Camino Portugues.(2018)
- Stressed Hearts – Strolling the Camino de Santiago. (2016)
You’ll be able to view his profile on Amazon.
