By Jaeyeon Choe, Glasgow Caledonian University
What do you do and where do you go when you grieve? This simple question reveals a significant gap in the UK’s approach to bereavement support. Whilst established grief traditions exist in many cultures worldwide, the UK’s resources for addressing bereavement’s enduring impacts are notably limited. This challenge has become particularly acute as the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) faces mounting pressures in providing adequate bereavement support services. With waiting lists lengthening and mental health resources stretched thin, bereaved individuals are increasingly seeking alternative pathways to process their loss and find meaning in their grief.
Enter an unexpected yet profoundly effective resource: pilgrimage walks. The UK offers a wealth of pilgrimage heritage—sacred and secular alike—with walking routes that traverse ancient paths, link historic sites, and wind through some of the nation’s most stunning landscapes. Yet this therapeutic potential remains largely unrecognised and underutilised within communities. From the Saints’ Ways of Cornwall to the historic routes leading to Canterbury, from Scottish coastal paths to Welsh pilgrimage routes, the UK’s pilgrimage heritage provides a rich, accessible network of therapeutic spaces.
Beyond religious boundaries
In an increasingly secular society, pilgrimage walks offer something distinctive: opportunities for reflection, spiritual engagement, and personal fulfilment, alongside respite from our digital world. These journeys harness therapeutic benefits across multiple dimensions—physical, psychological, emotional, social, and environmental. The act of walking itself becomes meditative, whilst traversing natural settings and historic routes contributes to wellbeing through connection with nature, the self, and something greater than oneself. For many, this journey through landscape can become a journey through grief, with each step offering both literal and metaphorical progress.
Moreover, pilgrimage walks can foster community connection. Whether undertaken alone or in groups, these journeys create spaces for shared experience, social support, and the discovery of local heritage. Participants often report profound connections formed with fellow walkers and local communities alike, united by the shared rhythm of walking and, for some, the common language of loss.
A time-honoured response to loss
Engaging in pilgrimage as a means of coping with grief is far from new. Throughout history, bereaved individuals have undertaken journeys to sacred sites, ancestral lands, or meaningful locations as a way of processing loss and maintaining connection with deceased loved ones. The Camino routes across Europe have become particularly popular amongst those navigating grief, drawing thousands of bereaved pilgrims annually.
It is important to recognise that grief encompasses a wide spectrum of experiences. Beyond the death of family members and loved ones—including non-human companions whose loss can be deeply felt—grief emerges from health challenges, relationship endings, career changes, migration, and numerous other significant life transitions. Each of these losses deserves recognition and space for processing, coping and healing.
Pilgrimage facilitates grief work through multiple mechanisms. It provides dedicated time, space, and place away from daily routines and responsibilities. The physical journey enables meaning-making as individuals walk through their emotions and memories. The act of moving through landscape can influence grief expression, offering a tangible metaphor for the grief journey itself. For some, pilgrimage reshapes how they understand their loss and envision their future. At deeper levels, participants may experience renewed purpose, spiritual insights, or transformed self-understanding following loss, finding new meaning and direction in life after profound change.
The evidence gap
Whilst the practice of grief pilgrimage has ancient roots and contemporary relevance, it remains under-studied in academic literature. Some existing psychological and anthropological research demonstrates pilgrimage’s profound impact on grief processing, yet the mechanisms driving these effects remain largely unexplored. How exactly does walking through landscape facilitate emotional healing? What role do natural environments play in grief resolution? How do historical and spiritual sites contribute to meaning-making? Which elements of pilgrimage programmes prove most effective for different types of loss?
These questions require rigorous investigation. Research exploring bereavement-focused routes and programmes could illuminate pilgrimage’s therapeutic mechanisms and effectiveness. Such evidence would be invaluable for developing best practices and ensuring programmes meet bereaved individuals’ diverse needs. Understanding these nuances would highlight bereavement pilgrimage’s potential as a flexible, self-determined intervention offering unique support extending beyond clinical approaches—particularly valuable where public health sectors face resource constraints and many individuals prefer non-clinical coping resources.
Practical initiatives and future directions
Recognising these opportunities, the British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT) has been running bereavement pilgrimages since 2024 to address significant gaps in NHS support provision. The BPT offers thoughtfully designed programmes incorporating guided walking, wildlife observation, visits to ancient sites, engagement with local histories and spiritual locations, and interaction with natural topography. Importantly, these programmes balance movement with structured periods for rest and reflection, recognising that grief work requires both active engagement and contemplative space. Participants have responded positively, with many reporting transformative experiences, and consequently the programme continues to expand.
International examples offer further inspiration. In the Netherlands, the Walk of Grief provides a dedicated grief walking route. Developed in 2023, this five-day pilgrimage traverses the natural landscape of the Dutch island of Terschelling, offering bereaved individuals an intentionally designed space for processing loss within a supportive structure.
Social prescribing: a path forward?
Despite promising practices, scholarly engagement with bereavement pilgrimage remains limited, and the evidence base requires strengthening. Researchers should document participants’ experiences, explore underlying mechanisms, evaluate outcomes, and examine what facilitates lasting change. Such understanding would enable more targeted efforts to increase accessibility and establish pilgrimage as a recognised approach to living with loss.
Beyond academic contributions, addressing public health challenges requires evidence-based guidance on grief pilgrimage for community benefit. Social prescribing might offer a potential avenue here. This approach connects people experiencing non-medical needs—including bereavement—with community support and services. Rather than defaulting to medical interventions, healthcare professionals can refer individuals to community-based resources that address wellbeing holistically.
Social prescribing could enable healthcare professionals to refer bereaved individuals to pilgrimage walks and associated practices as a form of community support. By recognising pilgrimage as a legitimate social intervention, we create sustainable resources that serve local communities whilst revitalising under-utilised heritage routes. This approach addresses individual grief through meaningful activity, strengthens community connections, and preserves cultural landscapes—creating support systems rooted in place, history, and shared experience.
Integrating pilgrimage into social prescribing will undoubtedly face challenges. Link workers and communities may perceive pilgrimage as inherently religious or elitist—an activity associated with those who have the leisure time, physical fitness, and financial means to undertake extended journeys. There are also practical barriers to consider: coordinating programmes across different regions, training link workers to understand pilgrimage’s therapeutic potential, ensuring routes are physically accessible to people with varying abilities, and establishing frameworks to measure outcomes effectively.
Despite these genuine concerns, beginning with small-scale pilot programmes could demonstrate viability whilst addressing barriers incrementally. Starting locally—with short, accessible routes and clear secular framing—could challenge misconceptions and build an evidence base. Such modest beginnings could ease pressure on overstretched NHS services whilst revitalising the UK’s pilgrimage heritage as a resource for healing, proving that ancient paths can serve contemporary needs.
The geography of grief need not be one of isolation and clinical settings alone. Through pilgrimage, we can chart new territories of healing—walking ancient paths towards renewal and wholeness.
About the author: Dr Jaeyeon Choe currently works as a Lecturer in the Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) and as a Visiting Professor at Hue University, Vietnam. Her interdisciplinary research encompasses pilgrimage, religious, spiritual and wellness tourism, social sustainability, and the wellbeing of marginalised communities. She has delivered keynote speeches at tourism, geography and industry conferences across Asia and Europe, and serves as Associate Editor for the Tourism Geographies Journal, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Dr Choe works actively with government and community organisations: she co-founded the Refugee and Migrant Leisure Network with community organisations and local councils in Southern England, and serves as a board member for the Glasgow Tourism Advisory Forum. She is also a regular media contributor, having published articles in The Conversation UK and appeared on BBC Scotland Radio.
Suggested further reading
Asker, C., Gorman, R., Lowe, T.A., Curtis, S., Moon, G. & Jones, J. (2024) The past, present and future of health geography: An exchange with three long standing participants in the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12940
Knowles, R. (2025) Narrating health and well-being with vulnerable participants: The ethics of composite fiction as a creative method in health geographies. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70042
How to cite
Choe, J. (2025, October) Grief pilgrimage and social prescribing: geography of healing. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/WDZE2753
Geography Directions 