Today the Catholic Church in England celebrates the Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, and behind that apparently simple entry in the liturgical calendar lies one of the most extraordinary stories in English Christianity.
Nearly a thousand years ago, according to the ancient tradition of Walsingham, a Norfolk noblewoman named Richeldis de Faverches experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary in which she was shown the house at Nazareth where the Annunciation had taken place and was asked to build a replica of it in England, the traditional date was 1061.
Whether every detail of that account can be reconstructed historically is another question, but what followed certainly can; Walsingham became one of the greatest pilgrimage destinations in medieval Christendom, attracting kings, nobles and ordinary pilgrims from across England and beyond. So intimate did the association with the Holy Family become that this little Norfolk village acquired the extraordinary title of England's Nazareth.
That name tells us something which seems to be often forgotten about medieval England: Catholicism was not merely a collection of doctrines accepted by our ancestors or a Sunday obligation performed within parish churches. It permeated the physical and imaginative landscape. Pilgrimage routes crossed the country; shrines accumulated memories across generations; bells ordered the day; saints supplied the calendar; and places themselves acquired sacred associations. Walsingham became one of the places where heaven and earth seemed particularly close.
For centuries pilgrims travelled there to enter the Holy House, a representation of an ordinary domestic dwelling in Nazareth where Christians believed something unimaginably consequential had happened: a young Jewish woman had given her assent to God and the Word had become flesh.
The instinct behind Walsingham is profoundly Catholic. Christianity is not, after all, a religion in which matter is something to be escaped, at its centre stands the astonishing claim that God entered His own creation, took flesh, inhabited a particular place, lived within a human family and walked upon actual roads which could be touched by human feet. Pilgrimage follows naturally from the Incarnation because Christianity insists that places can matter.
And then came the Reformation.
In 1538, during Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries and shrines, Walsingham Priory was dissolved and the shrine was destroyed. The image of Our Lady of Walsingham was taken away, traditionally believed to have been carried to London and burned. The Holy House disappeared and the pilgrimage ceased.
One of the great devotional centres of medieval England was reduced to ruins.
Had you stood among those ruins in the later sixteenth century, it would have been perfectly reasonable to assume that the story was over. The religious civilisation which had produced Walsingham was being dismantled around it, its monasteries dissolved, its shrines destroyed and its devotional culture increasingly passing beyond living memory.
And yet Walsingham was not forgotten.
Centuries passed before organised pilgrimage returned, but eventually Catholics began travelling there again. The Slipper Chapel, the last traditional stopping place for medieval pilgrims approaching Walsingham, was restored to Catholic use in the nineteenth century, and in 1934 Cardinal Francis Bourne led a great national pilgrimage there attended by tens of thousands.
Today pilgrims once again walk the Holy Mile, Mass is celebrated once again and the Rosary is prayed, candles are lit and a Norfolk village once again receives pilgrims who come because of something Christians believe happened in a house in Nazareth two thousand years ago.
Whatever way you look at it there is extraordinary continuity in that.
Buildings can be demolished remarkably quickly. Institutions can be suppressed. Statues can be smashed and shrines dismantled. A government possessing sufficient power can alter the physical appearance of a country within a generation but the memory of the people is rather more difficult to eradicate.
Perhaps that is why I personally find Walsingham so moving. Its significance lies not simply in what survived the Reformation physically, because very little of the medieval shrine did. Its deeper significance lies in the fact that something which appeared to have been extinguished nevertheless remained sufficiently alive within the Christian memory of England to be recovered centuries later. And today there is another small but significant chapter in that recovery, since 2024, Our Lady of Walsingham has been celebrated not merely as an obligatory memorial but as a Feast throughout the Catholic dioceses of England. Almost five centuries after the shrine was destroyed, the Church in England once again gives Walsingham particular prominence in her liturgical life.
There is something rather beautiful about that, Henry VIII's commissioners could destroy the Holy House. They could suppress the priory and end the medieval pilgrimage. They could leave Walsingham apparently belonging to the past. But nearly five hundred years later, on 24 September, Catholics throughout England once again celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Some things, it seems, are considerably harder to destroy than buildings.