We walked out our door this morning and down the Isle of Dogs to St. Edmund's Church where we prayed for the intentions of our pilgrimage. Our Parish Priest, Fr. Peter Harris, gave us a blessing. It included a long passage from the book of Tobit and was quite beautiful. We were moved.
While we were in the church it had started to rain, so we walked in the rain, but when we exited the Greenwich Foot Tunnel under the Thames it had, thankfully, stopped. In Greenwich we made a brief stop at the Hawksmoor church of St. Alphege in Greenwich. St. Alphege was a holy Archbishop of Canterbury killed by his Viking captors in 1012 and canonized shortly thereafter. Saint Thomas Becket prayed to him just before his own murder in Canterbury Cathedral. General Wolfe, the victor of the battle of Quebec, is buried in the church (his parish church).
We walked on through Greenwich park, waving to General Wolfe's statue up the hill by the Observatory. We soon joined the Green Chain Walk which took us through a series of quite lovely parks. A lot nicer than walking through the urban cityscape of the endless London suburbs. Very pleasant until the rain came down again.
Eventually the rain stopped and, soon after passing the ruins of Lesnes Abbey, we came to the Thames riverside near Erith. It was 3 o'clock and well past our lunch time so we went into Morrison's supermarket in Erith and had some fish and chips. Then out into the gathering dusk and on to the Slade Green railway station and home.
We walked about 15 miles but, because the batteries on the GPS gave out this is only an estimate. About 10 hours from Limehouse to Slade Green. Not very fast, but there were a lot of stops.
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