I walked the Camino de Santiago on my own with my guitar this April. I’m currently working on an EP inspired by the journey.

This is the unabridged version of a piece I wrote for Tatler Magazine about my experience

For 38 days I have been following seashells, quite literally over hill and dale, from Southern France to the Western coast of Spain. Shells built into stone walls running along back gardens, cemented into city pavements, painted into the stained-glass windows of churches, silver shells custom made fordoorknobs, engraved into marble Cathedral walls, and bouncing upon the backpacks of fellow pilgrims along the 856km road.

Years ago, when I was living in Salamanca, a sailor friend told me that when he´d finally reach land after weeks at sea, he felt as though it belonged to him. I also read a book called Duende, a true story about a man´s musical pilgrimage, searching Southern Spain for the soul of Flamenco, lost beneath the flashes of its´ Andalusian skirt. Both of these memories stayed with me. And I woke up in January finding no reasons not to walk the Camino de Santiago.

There were people I wanted to pray for. I´d become obsessed with writing music about previous travels and wanted to write more, this time an album. Social media gives me a headache. I think I needed a slightly longer walk than usual. So, at the turn of April I performed in a beautiful Church called Union Chapel and bid adieu, bound for another.

And then there I was, after a flight to Biarritz and a brief train journey, sitting a hostel with seven others in St Jean Pied de Port, munching on a piece of buttered baguette with jam at 5:45am. ¨Are you taking that Guitar? ¨ One guy asked, with crumbs. ¨Yeah¨ I replied¨.

¨Roughly seven and half hours today¨, he said. ¨Over the mountains and into Spain. Take it easy¨. And so, began a long and gentle conversation with myself, and the many others who would walk into my life for a little while.  

The days grew lovelier and uniquely so. I had sung ´Wild Mountain Thyme´ with an elderly man from Edinburgh halfway up the ´Alto pardon´ or ´Mountain of forgiveness´. “How could this breakfast get any better?” said a guy from Budapest sitting beside us tucking into ham and eggs, fuel for the climb. That same Scot was walking the entire Camino as a way of recovery from a stroke. Incredible. Bits of paper with prayers and poems and phone numbers on them had begun to accumulate in my pockets. I´d walked through a small-town singing and playing the guitar with a friend, as a gathering crowd of pilgrims followed on behind to listen, asking if we´d continue and offering us scallop shells, freshly scooped from a fountain of free wine.  

Delivered back to the simplicity of one foot after the other, you´d occasionally hear a voice say ¨Look! We must be heading back into the mountains¨ And, four days later, up we went, and back down again. Through the combed clay vineyards of Rioja, thicketed with dogwood roses. Over cobbled bridges, under motorways, out of sun-drenched woodlands, open country. All kinds of hill: sugar-lumped, baggy, jagged or ¨Bald ones with receding tree lines¨ as my American friend put it. Thick Spanish church bells would ring out through rambling sunshine and thin rain. It became a patchwork quilt of people´s Sunday walks. One long meditation.

Then one morning, through the kind Iberian drizzle, and a mere 520 miles later, I hobbled into the arms of the great Spanish Grandmother, Santiago de Compostela. Home to the relics of Saint James, and so giving us ´The way of St James´, the way upon which I´d every so often glance down and ahead and consider the footsteps before me, over a thousand years of them. Pottering through time along the same path. We cowboy camped from Santiago to the coast, or ´The end of the earth´, as the Romans believed it was, naming it ´Finis Terrae´. Everyone wanted these final moments to be tougher, so that when we reached the sea everything might just melt away. It did.

And after 546 miles of walking with only two days of rest, tentless camping and a perpetual fear of bedbugs, never has a girl been so happy to find a hydrotherapy bath, a margarita and the fluffiest of cushiony things at ´The Hotel A Quinta Da Auga Relais & Châteaux´. I was able to stop, sit and process what on earth I had just done.   

Somewhere bang in the middle of Spanish nowhere the inner sparkle that I´d spent years wormlessly fishing for had actually returned to my fingers and toes. What was it about the Camino that was able to mend years of emotional mousetraps, social media hangovers and a slightly muddled sense of who I was? The exercise? The unbeatable beauty of the natural world? The perspective? The practice of patience? My brief spell as a modern explorer? The primal simplicity of walking, eating and sleeping? The rediscovery of one´s own rhythm? Without deadlines or tube times or unhelpful people. Or the constant, tangible feeling of gratitude for a bed, or a bocadillo with Jamón or a coffee? It was often, in the words of Evelyn Waugh, ´as quiet as a prayer, and as powerful´