Welsh Pilgrimage: A quest for a reaffirmed national identity and a secular journey to a spiritual locus

This chapter takes the form of an autoethnography focusing upon a long-awaited journey with a group of friends to the destination of Caldey Island off the coast of South Wales in the UK which is home to a Cistercian monastery. This, to my mind, is a meaningful journey which, whilst not a traditional, religious pilgrimage, can definitely be described as a journey with a spiritual element outside of my ordinary, day to day life (Van Gennep, 1960), and it is certainly to a place imbued with cultural significance. Visiting a religious place for secular purposes might seem to be a contradiction, but this journey and its destination resulted in a very real sense of communitas from an enhanced connection with my fellow travellers (Turner and Turner, 1978).

Within this work, I originally set out to consider what the real meaning of the quest was - whether it was the prima facie journey to Caldey Island itself, or a more implicit, internal pilgrimage to reassert my recently subdued Welshness amongst my English friends, resulting in something of a self-[re]transformation. Having recently moved from Wales to England, I consider within this work the internal imperative for me to confirm and reassert the historical and cultural, national values which are such an important part of my heritage, and crucial components of my proud, individual, Celtic identity. In the writing of this chapter, I have become acutely aware that the journey to Caldey had less to do with the location, and much more to do with the loss of the heritage and family values with which I was raised. My Welshness has been waning over the decades perhaps, and it is only with the loss of my last bastion of expression of national identity - the choir - that I have recognised and reflected on the loss of participation in Welsh events. This autoethnography has therefore morphed somewhat from a discourse on a secular outing to a religious locus, to become an introspection on the loss of cultural markers and their contribution to my nationalistic identity.

Within this chapter I question whether the concepts of pilgrimage and tourism can exist independently of one another, or whether spiritual tourism can cover both categories. Finally, I explore the many types of liminality that seem to occur throughout this pilgrim/tourist experience, finding that I am constantly dealing with blurred boundaries that exist in many different aspects of the pilgrimage, tourist experience, and self-transformation.