A Furnace Full of God: A Holy Year on the Camino de Santiago
REBEKAH SCOTT
(PEACEABLE PUBLISHING, 264 PP, £12.21)

According to a pre-lockdown ­double-page spread in The Times, ­pilgrimages are making a comeback. For £2,000, one can enjoy a mentally and ­spiritually refreshing walking holiday organised by the Catholic Herald. But there are cheaper options, and to prove it this author has published an illuminating report of how, in 2006, she and her husband left journalistic jobs in the United States to found a refuge – their home to this day – for some of the pilgrims who hit the road to the shrine city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, every year: 300,000 of them in the Holy Year of 2010 alone.

Glamorous is hardly the word to describe life in Moratinos, a tiny, sparsely populated town in the middle of the 500-mile, 1,000-year-old pilgrim trail, but Rebekah Scott has turned their adventure, and the adventures of the disparate wayfarers who passed through Peaceable Kingdom – the name they gave their far-from-luxurious farmhouse – into a beacon of warmth on the way west via Palencia.