Tales from the Road: Stories Heard by a Pilgrim (maybe).

Katherine Lack introduces her book, The Cockleshell Pilgrim, A Medieval Journey to Compostela as a “…reconstruction of one man’s attempt to walk from England to Spain, to worship at the shrine of St James at Compostela.” The remains of the man, who Lack suggests was called Robert Sutton, were accidently uncovered in Worcester Cathedral in 1986. These bones were accompanied by the artefacts of a pilgrim and a cockleshell. This object is associated with the Way of St James or El Camino in Spain. If the ‘Cockleshell Pilgrim’ walked to Santiago de Compostela, he would have covered over 1000 miles, travelling through different kingdoms, each with its own beliefs and customs, landscape and climate. At each resting place, stories would be shared with other travellers. Those fireside retellings of miracles, heroes and monsters could have the power to inspire, amuse and terrify the weary traveller. I am researching this journey, drawing the different landscapes through which he passed and the stories, myths and folktales that he may have encountered. This is a process of mapping a medieval pilgrimage by illustrating the different narratives heard whilst on the road. Lack describes her written account in the following way, “The framework, in the other words is ‘fact’, the journey is a ‘fiction’.” I am using the same formula with my own artwork and allowing the characters from these tales to inhabit the ‘real’ world experienced by Sutton. By taking influence from Magic Realism writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Paulo Coelho, I aim to create work that communicates the fear and superstition that would have been encountered whilst on a pilgrimage.