Holy Places

This year, as they have for millennia, people will set out on pilgrimages. From Mecca to the Outer Hebrides, each of these journeys will be filled with spiritual and personal meaning - and as well as political statements, cultural battlegrounds and contested stories.
Holy Places follows the trail of pilgrimage from the humble origins of the greatest faiths to sites of modern devotion and celebrity. In Rome, pilgrimage shaped the city's streets in ways still visible today. Muxima in Angola testifies to the violent blending of Christianity and indigenous tradition. Tai Shan has helped generations of Chinese leaders cement power, while pilgrims to the Ganges must grapple with modern pollution as they seek spiritual purity in its waters.
Pilgrimages have meant the start of faiths, the birth of cultures and the end of civilizations. Holy Places wrestles with the complex histories and contemporary endurance of one of our most fundamental human urges.

Kathryn Hurlock is Head of the History Research Centre and Reader in Medieval History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Britain, Ireland and the Crusades and Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, among others. She has featured on BBC Breakfast and You're Dead To Me and in the Independent.