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HIKEFORHOPE 2025
John O'Groats to Salisbury - 5th March – 16th April 2025
Bruce Carter is in his fifties, self-employed in property maintenance, living with his wife Pip in Salisbury and part of the serving team at Salisbury Cathedral. Increasingly drawn to identify with the suffering of the Palestinian people in recent years, and having encountered ABCD at Greenbelt Festival, he decided to make this Lenten Pilgrimage. He will Hike for Hope from John O'Groats to his home town Salisbury to raise money for the rehabilitation of injured and traumatised children in the Gaza Strip.
Bruce’s motivation for the walk
Over the last 2-3 years at Greenbelt, we have listened to talks about life in Palestine. The speakers often say the only way to understand what life is like for them is to ‘Come and see’ so I planned to visit, but since 7th October 2023 it has obviously become more unlikely that I'd ever be able to get to Palestine.
I had planned to take time off work during Lent 2025, and I had thought that if I couldn't go to Palestine then I would use that time to do something else – maybe raise money or work for a charity involved in Palestine. These last two years at Greenbelt we've got to know the volunteers who run a stand for ABCD; and this year I decided that I would use my time to do something for this charity.
The idea for a walk came to me when I recalled a book that I had read during Lent one year. The author Trystan Owen Hughes talked about the etymology of the word to ‘saunter’ and discussed the idea of walking through the world and seeing God’s presence all around us. Since lockdown I have done a few long walks, and I wondered how far I could walk during Lent. Using the internet, I checked how far it is from John O’Groats to Salisbury, approx. 660 miles; when I divided that by 15 miles (the distance I think I could manage each day) it came up as 44 days (Lent having 40 or 46 days, depending on if you count Sundays). And then suddenly the mad idea of doing a sponsored walk of John O'Groats to Salisbury was born.
The other thing which has affected me is listening to the voices of refugees on the radio and reflecting on the distances they have to walk to try to find safety. They don’t have a choice, but I do.
