Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates the potential of walking with reference to a medieval context. Based on fieldwork on the Cathar Trail, it argues that particular meanings developed through people’s walking. Walking meditation, historical narratives, imagination and gesture were particularly important.

Paper long abstract:

This paper demonstrates the potential of the physical activity of walking with reference to a medieval context. It is based on fieldwork on the Cathar Trail, a long-distance hiking trail in the south of France which was named after a persecuted medieval minority. Walkers and long-distance hikers came to the trail with a particular, socio-culturally defined project: to reground themselves through 'nature' and the 'elementary human experience' of walking. Adopting a phenomenological approach to human-environment interaction, the paper focuses on people's kinaesthetic experiences once on the trail. It draws on their narratives of movement and history, on the researcher's perceptions and experiences and on historical accounts and novels.

I argue that movement was crucial in generating physical and imagined Cathar worlds. It was the act of embodied and emplaced walking which was constitutive of meaning for certain walkers and hikers on the trail. Here, I follow Vergunst (2012: 29) who argues that meaning forms through people's gestures in the process of their engagement with their environment. I discuss features of long-distance hiking and an organised travel group's 'conscious walking', a holistic wellness practice which involves walking meditation. Walkers and hikers experienced a heightened awareness of existential needs and a sense of self which encompassed their environment. Following phenomenological and ecological philosophers, I argue that our imagining inheres in our bodily gestures. Walkers imagined the Cathars through walking along paths, enduring climbs and descents and battling against the wind. They shaped the historical narratives of an itinerant religious minority.