Thetownend.com

 I've got a little book by a chap called G Newton Johnson...it's called Footpath Guides 55: Around Marlborough.   It was written just after WW2.

 Here's the puzzler, and I'll quote from his intro:


The only reference I've ever seen to this Pilgrim's Way....now I know some think Calne worthy of a pilgrimage, but I don't suppose it was to the Harris's Bacon Factory.

Anyone shed on light on this?

The churches in calne from Compton direction would be st Peters at blacklands,  then holy trinity on the a4, then st Marys in the town centre.
I would hazard a guess that it went somewhere near Winterborne Bassett, avebury,  Yatesbury Compton, calne

Never heard of it.

Plenty of little villages between Wroughton & Calne with little villages, so the route could've been anywhere really.

I've walked from Wroughton to Broad Hinton across the fields before so approximate route and bloody nice it was too.

In the book I'm assuming a walk running parallel with the Ridgeway but down in the villages which sprung up along the line of the spring on the edge of the downs. It's probably still doable but lots of cutting back and forth. What would the list of villages be? Wroughton, Elcombe (shared church), Broad Town, Clyffe Pypard, Clevency, Compton B, Calne? That's a bottom of the downs walk but could detour to the top via Uffcot, Winterbournes, Avebury etc.

I nearly set a land speed record down the hill at Clyffe Pypard in early 90s on a £100 mountain bike from Halfords.

I sometimes do most that route, as an alternative to the Ridgeway if walking from Avebury to Swindon, via Yatesbury...however it's still doable, and Clyffe Pypard is just about the only church after Compton Bassett. I'm as interested in why this was a pilgrimage route. Calne seems to have some connection with St Dunstan, who was a player in post Alfred Saxon England. Usually though at the end of a Pilgrim's Way, you had something for the adherents to see or buy or something.

Is/was there a pub called The Pilgrim in Calne?

No.

St.Edmund too reg. Something to do with a calne / abingdon route? Wroughton would be in the line of that route.

"string of little churches"  suggests Broad Hinton, Winterbourne Bassett, Berwick Bassett, Winterbourne Monkton then maybe Avebury onto Yatesbury and Compton Basett. Again still just about walkable in theory.

Who was St Edmund?

He became Archbishop of Canterbury whilst rector of Calne

 The Wilts CC website looks useful....had this to say on Winterbourne Monkton

 

Is he buried in the church or anything like that?  Winterbourne Monkton gets called Monkton because it was owned by the monks of Glastonbury who were big on pilgrimage...could Calne have been a stop on the way?

Westminster Abbey, I would assume?

To be an end point for a pilgrimage, you needed to have something there for pilgrims to see...and pay for bits of etc. or maybe a healing spring or well.

Apparently St Dunstan had something miraculous happen in Calne...do you know anything about that?

Have a look on wiki reg, under calne history. Interesting stuff.

In AD 978 Anglo-Saxon Calne was the site of a large two-storey building with a hall on the first floor. It was here that St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury met the Witenagemot to justify his controversial organisation of the national church, which involved the secular priests being replaced by Benedictine monks and the influence of landowners over churches on their lands being taken away. According to an account written about 1000, at one point in this meeting Dunstan called upon God to support his cause, at which point the floor collapsed killing most of his opponents, whilst Dunstan and his supporters were in the part that remained standing. This was claimed as a miracle by Dunstan's supporters

Dunstan was a Wessex man..well connected to the Cerdicingas + Glastonbury connections...could be that it justified a place of pilgrimage, for the yokels of Wroughton. No doubt you could flog bits of the timber from the floor.

Apparently Dunstan was very popular for several centuries in the early Middle Ages.

Anything known on the 2 storey building?

 :hmmm:

Found this from Richard Jeffries...

A good and a long way back to Coate is to go north-
west from Winterbourne Monkton to the tiny church of
St. Peter's, Highway, near Hilmarton, it and its weedy
and not populous churchyard half lost among thatched
white cottages. From there to Swindon is a footpath
through Clevancy, Clyffe Pypard, Broad Town, under
Bincknoll ' Castle,' through Elcombe, following, it may
well be, in places, the old pilgrim's way that led past Holy
Cross at Swindon, past Elcombe, Bushton, Clyffe Pypard,
and Studley, on its way to the shrine and well of St.
Anne's-in-the-Wood at Bridlington, in Somerset.

 Ok...I may be talking to myself here, where's Leefer when you need him.  :)

 It's not Bridlington, but Brislington.

 Swindon connection here in this

http://brislingtonarchaeology.org.uk/projects/st_anne/index.html

And where the fuck is Holy Cross in Swindon?

 Further, Edward Thomas noted writer just before the Great War, with Swindon links quotes....William Morris, of Desmond fame.


Think we're getting somewhere...I'd imagine that Newton Johnson is getting his stuff from Jeffries, who is probably getting it from Morris