The Catalan Flag hangs in shreds from an iron cross on the summit of Mount Canigou in the Eastern Pyrenees. Next to it I have wired a cockle shell, the symbol of the Pilgrimage for St. James. This seems as appropriate a place for the shell as it is for the Catalan flag, as it is for the Cross. These are all transitory symbols set on a mountain that will outlast them all, a mountain which was there long before the symbols had evolved, and which will be there long after, even though it is being eroded bit by bit. Eventually my shell will disintegrate and find its way back to the Mediterranean sea, nine thousand feet below, and some thirty miles eastward.
The Canigou is Catalonia’s Holy Mountain. I suspect that this is at least partly because it has been seen as the gatherer of rain, distributing it to the valleys at its feet, supplying the orchards of apples, pears, cherries, peaches and nectarines, as well as the plots of vegetables. There are complicated systems of irrigation here with stone and concrete channels which collect the water from the streams and run for miles around the hillsides, feeding the fields and orchards through little sluice gates at intervals.
I have been here in May when the rivers are rushing with snow melt, and in September when the snow has gone but thunder rumbles deeply around the great ravines that run upwards for thousands of feet towards a summit so often concealed by cloud. The Canigou is a benevolent giant generating water in what would otherwise be a dry landscape, and discharging alluvium into the valleys at its feet, the Tet and the Tech.
The French insist that the Tet valley formed one of the Ways of St. James. This, together with a notion that I would somehow be connecting with something older, more earthy, more primitive, seemed a good enough reason for me to finish a short journey on the summit of this mountain. I travelled from Montpellier ( a town on the prescribed Pilgrim Route from Arles ) at the bottom end of the Rhone Valley by bike, along the line of what my map described as the Roman road to Narbonne and which was now only a narrow track servicing the vineyards, a road that I felt must have at one time carried its fair share of pilgrims. At Beziers I left it for the Canal du Midi which I followed westward briefly before heading south again towards the hills known as the Fenouilledes. My motive here was to catch a glimpse of the Cathar castles of Peyrepertuse and Queribus, relics of a religion defined as heresy in the 13th century and destroyed by the Albigensian crusades. The Cathars didn’t believe in Pilgrimage, considering it an earthly occupation, but I felt no need to apologise to their ghosts for including their castles in my journey. The manner of the destruction of the Cathars and their religion has given them an enduring place in the history books, attracting more sympathy and interest than if the militant Church of the time had left them alone.
After descending through the vertiginous Gorges of Galamus I spent the night at St. Paul de Fenouilledes, after which I crossed another range of hills before descending into the valley of the Tet. This valley hums with traffic and seemed unbearably busy after the peace of the previous two days. I camped next at Vernet-les-Bains, seven thousand feet below the summit which was my destination; I had imagined that the mountain would reveal itself by degrees on my journey from Montpellier but this was not to be, for it remained persistently cloaked by cloud. I spent a day reconnoitering some of the paths that lead up the ravines to the summit and trying to assemble the strength and courage to do it. In the end I chose to take a track which started some way around the mountain to the east and which serviced the mountain refuge on a plateau two thousand feet below the top. If I could ride and push my bike to the refuge in one day I could ascend the mountain the following morning on foot and descend in the afternoon from the refuge by bike.
This, then, was what I did, and my cockle-shell was duly fixed to the cross, on a day when the clouds were all below me. I think that day climbing to the refuge was probably the hardest in my life with over six thousand feet of riding and pushing up a forest track which zig-zagged its way endlessly up a colossal ravine. I descended it five times faster than I climbed it, with my eyeballs leaping around in their sockets, and my modest amount of luggage (mostly extra clothing) crashing around in my panniers. It was certainly more exhilarating than going up and I was certainly fit for nothing when I crawled into my tent in Vernet-les-Bains that night. However, a good nights sleep was all that I needed to prepare myself for the easy ride down the Tet valley next day to Perpignan from which I was to take a train home.
On reflection I think my journey was too brief to qualify me as a pilgrim. I was something between mountaineer, cyclist, and spiritual tourist. Yet in the context of my other journeys (this was my fifth) over the last ten years I felt I had created another piece to fix to the structure of memories that are my Pilgrim experience. Each piece that I fix to that structure adds another dimension, another layer, another piece of a jigsaw without boundaries. I carry no vision of a finished structure because this is an organic thing which will grow as long as the thing which is essential to it, my enthusiasm for the idea of pilgrimage, is sustained.
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