John Brierley, who has died aged 75, was an author of bestselling guides to the Camino across Spain, as well as a philanthropist motivated by faith.
Last year almost 450,000 people visited the tomb of St James the Greater in Santiago de Compostela, having followed one of the several pilgrim routes, collectively known as the Camino, across Spain. Numbers have increased six-fold since 2003 when pilgrims began to use Brierley’s handy, pocket-sized guidebooks, which have sold a million copies and been translated into German, Hungarian and Korean.
Many other guidebooks have cribbed his methodology and facts, but few have rivalled Brierley’s pocket guides for their usefulness and for the clarity of their maps, the product of his skills as a surveyor.
Though some on the Camino might have wanted only to know about the route and where to eat or stay, Brierley believed that all were on a pilgrimage and he filled his guidebooks with notes on what he called the inner or mystical path, encouraging self-review and contemplation – and he left empty pages for pilgrims to reflect upon their own journeys.
William John Martin Brierley was born in Wolverhampton on April 2 1948, but his family moved to Ireland when he was a boy. Brought up in the Church of Ireland and educated at St Columba’s College, Dublin, he qualified as a chartered surveyor, and set up practice as Brierley & Co in 1971, later merging with Jackson-Stops and McCabe.
By the mid-1980s he was successful but felt he had become “materialistic and chauvinistic”. In 1986-87 he sold his house, packed his family into a camper van and went travelling. While in St Jean Pied du Port, France, he chanced upon pilgrims setting out over the Pyrenees. Wanting to know more, he followed them by road to Roncevalles and Pamplona and learnt for the first time about the historic routes to Santiago de Compostela.
Then, aged 39, he resigned from work, and the moved with his family to Findhorn, the spiritual community in the north of Scotland.
When, after two years, Brierley set out on his own “camino”, he quickly discovered that none of the existing guidebooks gave him the practical information he needed and that at the end of a day’s walk “an unexpected extra two or three kilometres is a nightmare when you are exhausted.” In Brierley’s guidebooks, the distances are always accurate: “I measure them on maps and wear a GPS device on each wrist,” he explained.
Nor did available guidebooks satisfy his sense of making an inner journey. “I got a sense that I was searching for something. I spent a week in silence, avoiding contact with others, lost in thought as I walked the route,” he told his fellow author and pilgrim Johnnie Walker. “There was a lot of rain, and I was soaked through most days. I climbed the mountain to O Cebreiro, and I went into the little chapel. I was cold, confused. I was aware something big was happening to me, but I didn’t know what it was.”
There, he knelt beside a memorial to Don Elías Valiña Sampedro, the parish priest who had been responsible in the 1970s and 1980s for much of the modern revival of the Camino. As he recalled: “I got a huge sense that I was being called. In that moment a rare ray of sunshine shone through the little window in the wall high above me and bathed me in sunlight. In floods of tears, I committed myself there and then to write the guides.”
Brierley walked the 789.1 km from France in 33 days – “one day for each year of the life of Christ” – but when he arrived in Santiago, “it was so disappointing, I couldn’t cope with the crowd. It was so oppressive, I retreated from the cathedral in tears. In that moment I decided to keep walking and so I immediately set off for Finisterre.”
There, three days later, he “got an overwhelming sense of death and resurrection,” and realised that his spiritual journey would continue for the rest of his life.
In 1996 he convened Business for Life, an international conference at Findhorn, at which he advocated sabbaticals as an antidote to career “burn-out”, and pilgrimage as a way to reappraise life’s purpose.
In 2000 he walked up through Western Nepal into Tibet to complete the Mount Kailash pilgrimage sacred to Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism.
In 2003 he published his first guide, to the most-trodden route, the Camino francés. The commercial success of his guides to the Camino routes from France and Portugal allowed Brierley, assisted by his daughter Gemma, to publish guides to other routes with less footfall.
He became a regular donor to pilgrim associations around the world. Latterly, concerned that the crowds on the route from France would turn into a horde, he made a significant donation towards a new international organisation which aims to develop the alternative pilgrim route from Lisbon to Santiago.
Brierley’s faith was paramount and he was committed to the concept of life as pilgrimage. Pilgrimage, he would explain in his soft Irish brogue, “slows us down and opens us inwards. In one direction lies illusion, the other truth.”
In the year before his death, having been told that no further treatment was possible for his cancer, he walked the Camino three more times.
In 1977 Brierley married Jill Hollwey. She survives him with their son and two daughters.
John Brierley, born April 2 1948, died July 2 2023
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKeSnsG2rdGinKxnYmV%2FdHuPcGZrbV%2BfvKm6jJupnpmiobK6ec%2Bio6CqmaKuqLGMrJinrJmWtLB5wpqkoqafYryjtdOumKuxXw%3D%3D