For hundreds of years, people all over the world have travelled great distances to visit the holy sites of their devotion and seek spiritual and physical healing. But these journeys involve more than travelling over land and sea, and the physical and mental hardship one must undergo to reach the place of worship. Indeed, a pilgrimage brings the devout to new realms of understanding of God and their place on earth, through the shared experience of enlightenment with their fellow seekers.

In 1991, with civil war raging throughout Yugoslavia, Pamela Hill and her wheelchair-bound mother set out on their own pilgrimage. The letters to her local Parish, recounting the journey, experiences and people they met, are compiled for the first time here.


Biog.
Mrs Jennie Newley (née Sarah Jane Hughes) was born in Glencormac, Co. Wicklow, Ireland in 1908. She came to England in 1926 at the age of eighteen. There she met and married Henry (Harry) Augustus Newley. She lived in the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary and St Patrick in Walthamstow, London E17. The parish celebrates its centenary in 2008. My dear mother would also have been a hundred years old on 29 June 2008 (the feast of St Peter and Paul).

I started the pilgrimage to Medjugorje, led by my mother, from the parish in Walthamstow. At the time, I was living in the parish of St Patrick's in Woodingdean, Brighton, East Sussex. I had lived in the same parish as my mother until I married David George Hill in 1954.