The Old Road Home is my attempt to recover some of the Christian memory through the history of Britain and Ireland, and to take those stories to a new generation through writing, podcasts and film. Britain and Ireland have been under a relentless assault to the extent that Christianity is now viewed as toxic and dangerous by a significant number of people and its a sentiment encountered in the younger generations. I'm raising £7,500 to get out from behind the desk and onto the old roads themselves, visiting the places, churches and archives where that history survives.
A friend told me a story recently which has stayed with me. He was driving with his fifteen-year-old daughter and absent-mindedly humming Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, to Parry's beautiful tune Repton. She asked him what it was. She had never heard it.
Americans generally sing the hymn to a different tune, but anyone of my generation in Britain will understand why that struck me. You didn't have to come from a particularly religious family to know it. We sang hymns at school. We knew the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and David and Goliath. We knew what somebody meant by a Damascus Road conversion or a Judas kiss. It was simply part of the cultural furniture.
Those of us over about forty-five have watched much of that disappear within our own lifetimes. In Britain, most children no longer begin the school day with a prayer and a hymn, and many can reach adulthood knowing remarkably little about Christianity or even the Reformation, one of the great ruptures in the history of these islands. The cultural baseline which previous generations acquired almost without noticing has largely gone.
And yet something rather interesting seems to be happening. People are becoming curious about Christianity again, including generations who have grown up with very little Christian background. Old pilgrim routes are being walked again. People are travelling to Iona and Lindisfarne. Americans are coming to northern Britain to walk in the footsteps of St Cuthbert and St Oswald. Protestants are looking seriously at Catholicism, while others are encountering Christianity almost from scratch.
The difficulty is that when someone becomes curious about Christianity today, his first teacher is very often the internet. I have written elsewhere about something I call Feed Drift: the way an innocent curiosity can gradually be pulled by algorithms towards increasingly narrow versions of a subject. One video leads to another, the feed becomes a community and the community can become a tribe. Religion is no more immune to this than politics. The result is that someone genuinely trying to understand Christianity can very quickly find himself presented with a highly partisan version of it. The further he travels down that particular rabbit hole, the more normal the more normal the voices at its extremes begin to sound.
You can see it in the extraordinary online spread of the claim that Catholics aren't Christians. Historically that belongs to a minority of particular strands of strongly anti-Catholic Protestantism, yet online it increasingly appears detached from those origins. I now encounter versions of it from atheists, Muslims and others with no connection to the evangelical churches which popularised it. An old sectarian argument has escaped from its historical and theological context and become internet folklore.
I think one answer is surprisingly simple: tell the history. And I happen to live almost on top of an extraordinary amount of it.
I live in Northumberland, in the old Christian landscape of Oswald, Aidan, Cuthbert and Lindisfarne. To the west and north lies the world of Columba and Iona. Monks, books, ideas and people moved between Ireland, Scotland, northern England and continental Europe long before the modern countries through which we now view their history existed. This is a Christian story more than a thousand years old, and it is still written across the landscape.
Then there is the Reformation and what came afterwards. We remember Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, the Armada, Guy Fawkes, Cromwell, the Covenanters, the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Jacobites. Much less familiar are the ordinary Catholics who somehow carried on through it all. They married and raised children, baptised them and buried their dead, sheltered priests and travelled to hear Mass. Some paid fines, lost their property or went to prison, and some died for their faith. Many more compromised, conformed outwardly when they had to, kept their heads down and quietly remained Catholic. Most weren't martyrs or great historical figures. They were ordinary people, and I find them endlessly interesting.
Their history isn't secret or undiscovered. Generations of historians have done the painstaking work of recovering it, but surprisingly little has escaped from archives, old documentary collections and academic history into our popular understanding of the past. One story I am currently researching begins with five surviving letters written by a young Catholic priest called Christopher Buxton to the Jesuit William Holt. Holt happens to be my ancestor. Here's my article on it to date.
Buxton was captured, imprisoned and executed at Canterbury in 1588. Following those letters has opened a door into an extraordinary world of priests, Catholic families, diplomats, informers and government agents moving between England, Scotland and continental Europe. More than four hundred years later we can still hear Buxton speaking in his own words, and I am now turning that story into a film series.
I'm Charles Palmer, a writer and historian living in Northumberland in the north of England. I became Catholic after a journey which took the better part of twenty-five years, and The Old Road Home grew largely out of the history, people and questions I encountered along the way. I'm not an academic historian or a professional filmmaker, and I don't pretend to be either. I'm a writer with a lifelong love of history, a convert who spent a very long time asking questions, and someone who believes that telling these stories well can help other people find their own way towards Christ.
I'm fortunate to live in one of the richest Christian landscapes in Britain. Lindisfarne, the country of St Cuthbert, St Oswald and St Aidan, the old Catholic families of the North and the remains of centuries of Christian history are all around me. I live with my family on a hill farm in Northumberland, so when I say much of this history is on my doorstep, I really do mean it. The more I researched my own way into the Church, the more I realised how much of it had slipped out of our common memory.
That is what The Old Road Home is becoming. It began principally as writing, and there is now a substantial body of essays on my Substack; more recently I have begun turning that research into podcasts and films. I want to use the enormous wealth of Christian history which lies almost literally on my doorstep to help fill the gap left by the disappearance of our Christian cultural memory. For my own countrymen and women, that means helping people rediscover Christ through the heritage and history which surrounds them but which many were simply never taught.
For America and the wider English-speaking world, there is another part of the story, because the religious history of America did not begin in America. English Protestants, Scottish Presbyterians, Ulster Scots, Anglicans, Catholics and dissenters crossed the Atlantic carrying their religious history with them. The Reformation and the conflicts which followed it helped shape ideas about Catholicism which travelled throughout the English-speaking world, and some of the arguments we encounter online today are descendants of arguments which began here centuries ago.
I want to take people back to the source: to the landscape, the churches, the letters and documents, and the men and women who actually lived through these events; and, through their stories, back towards Christ.
Until now I have funded The Old Road Home myself. I research and write the Substack, record the podcasts and produce the films with the resources I have. I am asking for £7,500 to help take the project into its next stage, allowing me to travel to the places where these stories happened, work with archives and original sources, buy specialist books and research material, obtain historical images and licences, produce maps and graphics, improve location filming and audio, and meet the practical costs of turning months of research into films which can reach people who would never pick up an academic history book.
Most of the research, writing and presenting will continue to be done by me. £7,500 isn't the price of creating The Old Road Home; the project already exists and will continue whatever happens. It is the money which will allow me to get out from behind the desk and do considerably more with it.
I already have much of the basic equipment. What I need now is the means to use it. Living on a hill farm in Northumberland means virtually every research trip begins with a drive, and diesel here is currently the equivalent of more than $10 a US gallon.
There is something rather extraordinary about the timing. Within my lifetime I have watched much of Britain's inherited Christian memory fade away, yet now people are walking the pilgrim roads again. Perhaps those two things are connected.
If you can help me follow those roads and tell the stories which belong to them, whether with £5, £10, £25 or considerably more, thank you. If you can't contribute financially, reading the Substack, watching the films and passing them on helps enormously. Above all, please pray for The Old Road Home, and for the people who may find Christ somewhere along the way.
Charles Palmer
Birtley, Northumberland
The Old Road Home
