If you are walking from Halling to Aylesford on Sunday 25 June you will find the annual summer fair at Aylesford Priory.

Those planning to start their pilgrimage to Canterbury this Thursday or Friday morning from Southwark may wish to know the arrangements at Southwark Cathedral for Ascension Day, Thursday 18 May.

At 8am on Thursday the Dean will be leading a group of people up to the top of the tower to sing Ascension Day hymns and hear the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

Those wishing to join in should be aware that there are a great many steps to climb. The group will descend in time for Morning Prayer at 9am.

The Ascension Day Choral Eucharist is at 5.30pm.

An organ meditation of music and poetry celebrating the feast of the Ascension follows at 7pm. Music will include L’Ascension by Olivier Messiaen.

A window has been unveiled at the City of London’s Brewers’ Hall to remember the Brewers’ patron St Thomas Becket.

It was commissioned from the Stained Glass Studios at Canterbury Cathedral and designed by its director Léonie Seliger whose work is seen in the Pilgrim’s Way churches at Boughton Aluph and Godmersham.

The design features the Brewers’ Company’s current coat of arms, granted in 1544 following the Reformation when Henry VIII expunged the Becket name from the calendar and banned pilgrimage. But the ‘new’ arms managed a subtle reference to their now secret patron by including a female moorish figure with golden hair to represent Becket’s step mother from North Africa.

Thomas Becket’s father was a malt merchant known as Gilbert the Brewer.

The original Brewers’ shield incorporating Becket’s archbishop arms, with its three choughs proper and pallium, is depicted below.

The Company’s Master Jonathan Neame, the Clerk and the Beadle, together with a number of volunteers from Shepherd Neame Brewery, walked the Pilgrims’ Way to collect the glass. This was handed over to the Master by the Archdeacon of Canterbury on the martyrdom site in Canterbury Cathedral.

The unveiling in London was performed by the Master who is also Shepherd Neame chief executive. His brewery produces the Bishops Finger ale which takes its name from the finger-shaped signposts pointing pilgrims the way to Canterbury and the tomb of Thomas Becket. It is one of the UK’s oldest bottled beers.

The label for Carolean Crown, a limited edition ale brewed to mark the Coronation of King Charles III, is based on a pub sign found on the Pilgrims’ Way in Southwark.

The pub’s name is a reference to the future Charles II hiding in an oak tree during the Cromwellian period.

The pub sign, above The Royal Oak in Southwark’s Tabard Street, is by Sussex artist Julian Bell.

The same artist has reworked the sign for the label chosen by Harvey’s brewery in Lewes for the celebration ale.

Southwark’s Royal Oak is a Harvey’s pub.

Carolean Crown pale ale is the lightest beer ever produced by Harvey’s and is described as ‘fresh with fragrant citrus notes’.

The bottled version (4% ABV) is blended with a portion of Elizabethan Ale, aged in oak casks, to mark the transition to a second Carolean era.

Pilgrim passports can be stamped at the Royal Oak.

Morris dancers will be up early on the two high points of the Pilgrims’ Way on May Day, Monday 1 May.

On St Martha’s Hill near Guildford the Pilgrim Morris are being joined by the Guildford Vox Community Choir at 5am to await, with song in the darkness, sunrise at 5.35am.

Further east the Kingston Spring Grove Morris, Ewell St Mary Morris Men and the Rampant Rooster Morris are meeting at the Box Hill viewpoint at 5am. Note that this top viewpoint is higher than the Pilgrims’ Way which runs round the south side of the hill.

In Rochester the rising sun is welcomed a little later at 8am with Jack in the Green making an appearance for the Awakening. There will be music and dancing around the cathedral for the rest of the day.

At Otford, where pilgrims from Southwark and Winchester meet, there is a fair on Palace Field with maypole dancing at 11.30am and 1pm.

Southwark Council has named a new building on the Old Kent Road after a Pilgrims’ Way village.

The residential development, on the corner of Mina Road opposite The Dun Cow, is to be called Wouldham Court.

Canterbury-bound pilgrims, when walking along Tabard Street, already encounter buildings bearing the names of pilgrim villages they will later visit. The Old Kent Road is also part of the ancient trail.

Wouldham village in Kent faces Halling across the River Medway and was reached by ferry. Although pilgrims now use the nearby Peters Bridge they can still pass through Wouldham when visiting Rochester Cathedral.

Southwark Council’s Wouldham Court is providing 17 flats and four three-bedroom houses for local people as well as a new community hall and a commercial space.

The Annunciation 2023, on Saturday 25 March, is the 900th anniversary of the founding in 1123 of Smithfield’s St Bartholomew priory dedicated to looking after the sick.

The church survived to feature in Four Weddings and a Funeral and its infirmary is now the famous Bart’s Hospital.

A silver chalice being used during this afternoon’s anniversary Eucharist, celebrated by the Bishop of London, was recently discovered at the back of a cupboard.

Engraved on it are the words ‘For the use of ye Lock in Kent Street Southwark’.

This cup recalls the Lock Hospital which stood by the Pilgrims’ Way from at least 1350, but probably the 1240s, until 1760.

The Lock, or Hospital of St Mary & St Leonard, stood on the right as you reach the end of Southwark’s Tabard Street (formerly Kent Street) where it merges with the Great Dover Street -created the 1750s just before the hospital closed.

Here the pilgrim would have passed its long wall and courtyard gateway before crossing the Lock stream flowing towards St Saviour’s Priory (now Bermondsey Square) and the Thames.

A milestone opposite the Lock indicated that the isolation hospital was safely a mile from London Bridge.

It appears that Henry VIII, who dissolved the Smithfield priory, did not also close this tiny leprosy and contagious diseases hospital. In 1549 the Lord Mayor of London and City aldermen, who three years earlier had reopened the monastic Bart’s Hospital, stepped in and placed Lock Hospital under Bart’s care.

Bartholomew Street at the junction (south side) recalls the Bart’s association.

Today Shrove Tuesday 2023 is the 850th anniversary of Archbishop Thomas Becket’s canonisation.

In 1173 this day 21 February was Ash Wednesday.

St Thomas of Canterbury, as he is also known, was murdered on 29 December 1170 during Vespers in Canterbury Cathedral.

The news which had shocked England, including even Henry II, reached Pope Alexander III in February 1171.

Alexander had succeeded Adrian IV, the only English Pope, and canonised Edward the Confessor. The Pope was aware of Becket in his lifetime.

Much of the pressure for a quick Becket canonisation came from Europe and when miracles had been established Alexander, living at Segni thirty miles south-east of Rome, presided at the canonisation.

Just before mid-Lent letters announcing the event were sent out from Segni with the one for Canterbury ordering the translation of the body to a better tomb. This papal demand was eventually fulfilled in July 1220 but pilgrimage had already begun.

The illustration is available as a postcard (80p) from Alison Merry shop.

Arrangements for the feast of St Thomas Becket, or St Thomas of Canterbury, at Canterbury Cathedral this Thursday 29 December have been announced:

8am Eucharist at Altar of the Swordspoint in the Martyrdom.

12.30pm Eucharist.

3pm Solemn Evensong & procession. The liturgy incudes passages from TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and the hymn In Our Day of Thanksgiving.

8pm Roman Catholic Vespers in the Crypt.

At St Thomas of Canterbury RC Church in Burgate there will be Mass at 7.30am & 12 noon.

In 1899 Hilaire Belloc walked from Winchester starting on 22 December to reach Canterbury on 29 December but the winter festival day was never in Pre-Reformation years a crowded occasion.

John Jenkins reminds us about this in his The Customary of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral published earlier this year.

Christmas was too cold for travel and more a time to stay at home and feast.

Estimates of visitors on each 29 December during the first 300 years following the martyrdom are sometimes as low as sixty. Those who made it, often locals, received bread, cheese and ale from the monks.

The bigger day, when crowds filled Canterbury, was and remains the Feast of the Translation on 7 July in the summer.