Walk the Canterbury Tales, Southwark to Canterbury
Twenty-nine strangers, one inn, and a storytelling contest to pass the road. Your everyday steps take you down the old pilgrims' way to Canterbury, and Chaucer's own lines unlock along it.
- 56 miles
- 8 stops
- Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1400
The pilgrims' road
Twenty-nine strangers meet at a Southwark inn, agree over supper to ride to Canterbury together, and pass the road by telling tales — the best of them filthy. Fifty-six miles of English road, with the fourteenth century talking the whole way.
The pilgrimage starts at the Tabard, a real inn in Southwark at the south end of London Bridge, and heads for the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Along the way Chaucer names the stops: Deptford, Greenwich, Rochester, Sittingbourne, Boughton under Blean. It is the route of the old Roman road through Kent, most of which you could still walk.
Chaucer planned for each pilgrim to tell tales on the way there and back, and died with the book far from finished. The pilgrims never quite arrive. In Bematist they do. The text is Chaucer's own Middle English, which reads better aloud than you'd expect. At fifty-six miles, it's the second-shortest journey in the library, a good first book.
- Distance
- 56 miles (90 km)
- Stops
- 8, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Geoffrey Chaucer; Project Gutenberg ebook #22120
Where it starts
Bifil that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght was come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye.
The Canterbury Tales · The General Prologue
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 7 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Canterbury take you?
Chaucer's pilgrims rode it in a few days. On everyday walks at true scale it's a couple of weeks. Or pick your own finish and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
8 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for Canterbury.
56 miles of The Canterbury Tales, on the walks you already take.
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