Pilgrimage is easy to describe but hard to define. It is a phenomenon common to almost all of human social existence, and certainly of the major world religions. I can offer a definition—a deliberate and special journey to a place of heightened religious significance in the anticipation of a transformational experience—but it would not be so difficult to argue that a weekly attendance at church could fall into that category. Some people might view their regular church attendance as a form of pilgrimage, but for most people it would not fit into their ideas of the term. Once we begin to include distance of travel as a factor, or regularity of journeying, we come up against more definitional problems—how far, how often? Is religion, an organized system of belief, necessary for pilgrimage to exist? In the modern world pilgrimage exists in non-religious contexts with identifiably similar emotions and significance, such as travelling to watch sport at the “hallowed ground” of a famous stadium, or to the birthplace or grave of a revered cultural or political figure. Is pilgrimage a purely individual concern or a social one, a difficult personal journey or an enjoyable group activity? Some boundaries of the term are fuzzy, some are definitional. We can all agree that pilgrimage exists, but we cannot necessarily agree on what it is.

As such pilgrimage lies in the realms of anthropological theory, a category of universal human behaviour to be observed, analyzed, and typified. Yet anthropological theory can only take us so far because pilgrimage is deeply personal. As a personal experience the elements which comprise the historical practice—the slow travel through a landscape and subsequent encounter with the space of a medieval church building—may seem to be replicable to anyone who desired to attempt it today.