I continue my Soul of a Pilgrim summer blog book tour with a stop at Christine Sine’s blog with a guest post on walking the rounds as an ancient practice of pilgrimage in Ireland.
The tradition of pilgrimage in Ireland is an ancient ones. There are many trails and paths known to be sacred for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
One of the more ancient Irish practices of pilgrimage is the turas, which means to “walk the rounds” in holy places. Often there is a series of pilgrim stations – a series of cairns, a holy well, a cross, a chapel or sanctuary space – and each of these invites a circumambulation in a sunwise direction (clockwise), always in harmony with the rhythms of the universe. The number of rounds varies, but generally is either a single round at each place to pause, or the sacred number of three rounds, or a full seven or twelve rounds, which are also all holy numbers.
