Author Oliver Smith is a guest on a Walking Writers’ Salon introduced by Andrew Stuck. Oliver talks about On This Holy Island (Bloomsbury Continuum 2024), about making a series of epic adventures across sacred British landscapes – climbing into remote sea caves, sleeping inside Neolithic tombs, scaling forgotten holy mountains and once marooning himself at sea. Following holy roads to churches, cathedrals and standing stones, his evocative and enlightening travelogue explores places prehistoric, pagan and Christian, but also reveals how football stadiums and music festivals have become contemporary places of pilgrimage.

The routes walked are often ancient, the pilgrims he meets are always modern. But underpinning his book is a timeless truth: that making journeys has always been a way of making meaning.