Pilgrim patterns

In the chancel of St Mary’s Church, Itchen Stoke, Hampshire, lies a tiled labyrinth of brown and green, bespeckled by kaleidoscope sunlight seeping through the stained-glass windows that surround it. Concentric rings span the floor, drawing the eye closer and closer to the centre. 

It is a scale replica of the famous labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in northern France. As a motif, it holds enormous spiritual significance. It is fitting that St Mary’s is on several pilgrim routes, such as the Camino de Santiago, where the weary traveller would finally arrive at the tomb of St James the Apostle. Labyrinths are, after all, their own journey, Pilgrim patterns symbolising the route to faith and the spiritual centre. A labyrinth is not a maze. Whereas a maze is designed to confuse, to test wit and direction, a labyrinth offers only one path.  

Winding and circuitous it may be, but ultimately it will lead to the centre. In short, it is not about getting lost but instead finding your way and embracing the journey. 

The history of the labyrinth stretches back thousands of years. The earliest known example was on a Mycenaean clay tablet discovered at the archaeological site of Knossos, in Crete. According to the historian of religion, Philippe Borgeaud, the tablet lists offerings, specifically mentioning a ‘goddess of the labyrinth’. Crete is apt, as in Greek mythology, the island housed perhaps the most famous labyrinth in history. Designed by Daedalus, the lead architect in the court of King Minos, this labyrinth was built to house the Minotaur, a fearsome hybrid of man and bull.  

The perceptive reader may notice how maze like this all sounds. The term comes from the Latin ‘labyrinthus’, which means maze. However, as each generation has been captured by the myth of Minos and the Minotaur, the labyrinth has evolved. 

From its origins at Knossos, the motif has spread across the world. It is found carved into Scandinavian rocks, forming patterns in Roman mosaics in bathhouses, villas, and tombs, and later embedded in Christian architecture. Each age has reinvented the labyrinth in its own image: a path of danger, trodden by those who were sent to face the Minotaur; a cosmic map, or a meditative journey. What remains consistent is the sense that to walk a labyrinth is to enter into a dialogue with something larger than yourself. 

It has long fascinated writers and thinkers. The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges returned to it again and again in his fiction, using the pattern as a metaphor for the complexity of existence. It is no coincidence that his best-loved collection of short stories is called Labyrinths. These are narratives that pose shifting meanings and journeys without clear resolution. Centuries earlier, Dante’s Divine Comedy charted a similar spiral through the moral universe – a descent and ascent whose structure echoes the winding of the labyrinth. The modernist poet T. S. Eliot also seems to look towards the labyrinthine in his Four Quartets, which reads: ‘The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’  

The labyrinth’s winding path enacts that very truth: through turning and return, the pilgrim is brought back to themselves, transformed. In churches, the form takes on a similar meaning. It is not to instil confusion, but a path leading with purpose, even when it feels you are going in the wrong direction. 

The earliest known labyrinth in a Christian context can be found in a basilica in Algeria, dating back to the early 4th century CE. By the Middle Ages, labyrinths had found a rich symbolic home in Christian spirituality. Medieval maps, such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, shared this same impulse to render spiritual journey as spatial design – the world itself drawn as a symbolic pilgrimage towards salvation. One of the most famous examples is in the afore mentioned Chartres Cathedral, laid into stone around 1,200 CE. Its 11 concentric circuits, spanning over 12m in diameter, invite the faithful to walk the distance between the outer world and the divine centre. For medieval pilgrims, with no means to travel to Jerusalem, it offered its own form of pilgrimage. It was a means of retracing Christ’s path through contemplation. The act of walking became prayer in motion.  

The influence of Chartres reached far beyond France, finding new expression in the Gothic Revival of Victorian England. St Mary’s, Itchen Stoke, was built between 1864 and 1866 to designs by Henry Conybeare, and its interior remains a marvel of 19th-century craftsmanship. The church is perhaps best known for its extraordinary stained glass, which fills the chancel with radiant light, illuminating the labyrinth beneath. In this sacred space, the medieval and the modern meet: a 19th-century echo of a 13th-century design that in turn reimagined a pattern thousands of years old. To stand in the chancel today is to sense that continuity. The labyrinth beneath the coloured light stands as a reminder that the path to understanding rarely runs straight. It bends, turns and doubles back, yet leads, ultimately, to a centre both ancient and ever renewed. Like the pilgrim who walks it, we return to where we began and know the place, as Eliot wrote, for the first time. 

Will's article appeared in Issue 26 of Pinnacle magazine. Pinnacle is released twice a year and is just one of the many benefits available exclusively for our members. To support our work and become a member, click here.