We’ll start our journey at midday in the ancient city of York, the capital of the North. After some orientation, and a chance to see the city from a hilltop, we’ll visit one of the old Catholic monasteries which were hidden after the Protestant Reformation.

Today we’ll focus on the city of York and its religious history. We’ll start with a spiritual practice in the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey, once one of the most prosperous monasteries in the kingdom, before walking the city (and its famous walls). The cathedral – York Minster – will be our last main stop. After a tour and time to wander, we’ll attend evensong to worship with others in this space.

We’ll head out of York to visit Ripon Cathedral, with its Anglo-Saxon crypt. From Ripon, we’ll walk to the ruins of Fountains Abbey, once one of the most important Cistercian monasteries in England. We’ll return to York for the night.

Today, we head north in earnest. We’ll take a coach to the southern edge of the North York Moors, where we will visit a parish church with a Celtic crypt. After a prayer practice there, we will walk west, skirting the moors, to the town of Hutton-le-Hole (and its folk museum!), before catching a bus to Helmsley.

After church in Helmsley, we’ll walk to another Cistercian Monastic ruin: Rievaulx. A medieval author describing this monastery in the twelfth century called it “a stronghold for the sustaining of the weak, the nourishment of the strong and whole…[since] there in very truth they might find peace and the ‘the holiness without which no man shall see God’.” (-Walter Daniel)

Leaving Helmsley, we’ll cross the moors by coach (with some walking!) and stop at a tiny Anglo-Saxon church, the bulk of whose fabric dates from the seventh century. In the afternoon, we’ll tour Hexham Abbey, which was first founded as a monastery around the same time that Escomb church was built, but whose current structure is mostly stunning twelfth and thirteenth century stonework.

With Hexham as our base, we’ll head west along Hadrian’s Wall, exploring Roman forts and fortifications, and thinking about the first Christianization of this outer edge of the empire, hundreds of years before the earliest church we’ll visit.

Today we’ll take a coach north toward Lindisfarne. We’ll walk across the tidal flats to the Holy Island itself, before the tide comes in to cut us (and the island) off from the mainland. We’ll spend the night here, taking time for quiet and contemplation in this liminal space, like the Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks who settled here in the early seventh century.

After a morning prayer practice, we’ll leave the island (by coach this time) and travel south. We’ll stop at the site of the monastery of Jarrow, where the Venerable Bede spent his life writing not only theology, but also much of what we know about the history of the places we’ve been traveling through. We’ll arrive for the night in Durham, another cathedral city and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We’ll spend the day in Durham. A main event will be our visit to the Norman cathedral, which is the resting place for the bones of many of the saints we will have encountered – including Cuthbert, whose remains were brought here from Lindisfarne by monks fleeing the prospect of a Danish invasion in the ninth century.

After wrapping up our visit to Durham, we’ll spend time on some closing activities both individual and as a group. In the early afternoon, we’ll go our separate ways!