For most of our 50-plus years our summer pilgrimage has been followed by an autumn reunion, a chance to get together with our fellow pilgrims and reminisce, discuss future plans and, for many years before we started internet diaries, to view photos / slides of the previous summer. The trouble with autumn reunions was always short days and potentially inclement weather. Several years we had a spring reunion to celebrate a major pilgrimage anniversary (20, 25, 30, 40 and 50 years). This year we decided to have the main 2025 reunion in spring 2026 – which maybe makes it a 2026 preunion…

As our pilgrimage family has become more dispersed geographically, numbers attending any reunion have dropped, and when relatively new pilgrims Julian and Claire Glover offered to host a reunion in their village of Old in Northamptonshire I prayed that it wouldn’t be a flop because pilgrims felt it was too far to travel. So I was delighted to find that a great turnout of pilgrims from across the country, some on their way to or from the north of England to plan this summer’s pilgrimage, had descended upon Old, a pretty village of caramel-coloured stone houses in rolling farmland.

There was a warm welcome as soon as we arrived, with one of Julian and Claire’s neighbours proving tea and toasted teacakes. When everyone had arrived we enjoyed a soup supper – warming homemade soups – in the community centre, before walking round the corner to the village hall for our overnight accommodation (complete with every pilgrim’s dream – showers!)

After a hearty breakfast, the walk on Saturday was an irregular figure of eight through the countryside, visiting a ruined church and passing a couple of other churches to the pub where we had a private room for our lunch. The walk back from the pub was shorter, and included visits to 2 churches.

Back at the hall for tea and cakes, some went off to attend the vigil Mass in Market Harborough and to say hello to Fr Chris who hosted our rest day there in 2024. Meanwhile others got to work cutting orange arrows out of large sheets of card. All together again, we enjoyed a good supper with a drink or two, and an evening of chatting and planning, before heading back to the Village Hall. We were joined for the walk and supper by local friends of Claire and Julian.

On Sunday morning there was another good breakfast before we set out in varying directions – some towards churches nearby or in Northampton, some home, some to do their exploration and planning for August.

So my concerns were unfounded: this was a wonderful reunion! Claire and Julian can’t claim all the credit for the countryside or the beautiful weather, but their work in planning and catering ensured we all had a really lovely time. Thank you both.

As ever, we did a web diary, which you can see at https://thepilgrims.org.uk/2026/reunion.php (that’s why there are no photos in this write-up!)

Meanwhile planning is well underway for our summer pilgrimage from Middlesbrough to Blackburn via Ripon and Skipton. You can see more details at https://thepilgrims.org.uk/book/