Pilgrimage routes have seen rising numbers of walkers, many of whom describe no religious motivation. The features that distinguish pilgrimage from a long walk are structural, and they explain the reports.
The destination is fixed and external
A pilgrimage has an endpoint chosen by tradition rather than by the traveller, and the route is largely determined by it.
That removes the continuous optimisation of ordinary travel, where every day involves deciding what is worth seeing and whether the itinerary is working.
Having the structure imposed frees attention from planning, which is a substantial part of why participants describe the experience as simplifying.
Effort is part of the form
Walking or otherwise travelling under one's own power is prescribed, and the difficulty is understood as constitutive rather than as an inconvenience.
Effort makes the arrival earned, and an earned arrival is experienced differently from one reached by the fastest available means.
It also occupies the body sufficiently that the mind runs differently, which is the same mechanism behind the long-standing association between walking and thinking.
The route creates a temporary community
Everyone on the path is doing the same thing in the same direction, which supplies conversation without introduction and company without arrangement.
The relationships are bounded, since participants will separate at the end, and that boundary allows a directness people rarely reach with those they will see again.
Long-distance walkers frequently describe this as the part they had not anticipated, having expected solitude and found something closer to the opposite.
Duration allows the transition to complete
Several weeks is long enough for the routine of ordinary life to lose its immediacy, which a weekend does not achieve.
Anthropological accounts describe an intermediate state during such passages, in which ordinary roles are suspended and not yet resumed.
That suspension is where the reported reappraisals occur, and it is why the length of a pilgrimage is not incidental to what it does.
Secular participation raises real questions
Routes maintained by religious institutions now carry large numbers of walkers with no connection to those institutions, which creates strain over crowding and upkeep.
Some communities have welcomed this as continuity of an old practice, while others regard it as a devotional route being used as a hiking trail.
Both readings have substance, and the practical accommodations along major routes reflect an unresolved negotiation rather than a settled arrangement.