Stitching Personal and other Pilgrimages at the Walking Assembly
Embroidering the cloth at start of Pilgrimage
The Walking Assembly began in Girona, where I had the pleasure of chairing anthropologist Tim Ingold's opening lecture, ‘The Valley and the Stream’. Drawing on Patrick Geddes' Valley Section, Tim invited us to think of the river not simply as a landscape to be crossed, but as a living process through which people, places and knowledge are continually shaped. It proved to be a fitting introduction to the days that followed.
Together with my partner, geologist Nick May, I led one of the four walkshops in the foothills of the Pyrenees: Personal and Other Pilgrimages. We invited participants to explore the Muga Valley through walking, conversation, collecting and embroidery, bringing together art and geology, human time and deep time.
Our group could hardly have been more international. Among us were walkers from Australia, Pakistan, Portugal, France, Spain, Catalonia, England, Scotland and the United States. Tim had also arrived by train from Scotland and also joined our walking starting at the Bassegoda campground.
Someone later described our group as "a rugby team". That felt very pertinent. We looked after one another, waited for one another on the climbs, shared food, stories and water, and gradually found our rhythm. The physical challenge of the walk—the steep ascent, the intense heat and the long day—gave it the feeling of a shared pilgrimage with a high dosis of cameraderie.
Our destination on the first day was the small church of Sant Bartomeu. Some walked in silence, while others found themselves singing in the ruins of the former monastery, where the acoustics transformed simple voices into something unexpectedly beautiful.
Before we set off, each participant received a square cut from my blue embroidered tablecloth and was invited to stitch their own Personal Pilgrimage over the two days. Whenever we paused, needles and thread appeared. Some embroidered beside the river, others while resting in the shade, and some even stitched as they walked. The slow rhythm of embroidery became another way of paying attention.
Everyone also found their own way of observing the valley. With a little bag in their hand, one person collected moss, another grasses, another herbs, while others gathered stones, feathers or fragments of conversation. Together these small collections became a collective field study, each person noticing a different aspect of the landscape. No single collection could have told the whole story, but together they revealed something of the richness of the Muga Valley. It was one answer to the question Clara Garì posed ourselves from the beginning: Can we learn without teaching?
By the time we reached the campsite that evening we were exhausted. As if to mark the end of the day's pilgrimage, the heavens opened and we were caught in torrential rain.
Tim's lecture stayed with me throughout the Assembly. During the final Assembly gatherin, his reflections sparked lively discussion. Some found his comments challenging; others recognised them as an invitation to look beyond ourselves. For me, the conversation echoed the very idea of the Valley Section. A river is made up of many currents, not all flowing in exactly the same direction. Walking together does not require consensus. It requires enough generosity to remain in conversation, allowing different ways of knowing to exist alongside one another.
Back home in Edinburgh, the embroidered squares have found their way into my work basket. I am now stitching them back onto the original blue cloth, reconnecting the individual journeys into a shared textile. Each piece carries its own rhythm of attention and its own pilgrimage, yet together they form something that none of us could have created alone.
Perhaps that is what a Walking Assembly is: not arriving at the same destination, but discovering that our individual paths can be held together within a shared landscape.
