Of places inaccessible to which pilgrims toil, some are the sources of rivers, like Gangotri, whence springs the Ganges:  others are islands, such as the Iles de Lerins off Cannes, Iona and Lindisfarne, or many off the West coast of Ireland:  or distant headlands, like the Spanish Finisterre, or Rameshwaram, the extreme southern cape of the Indian peninsula.  More numerous are those which lie high up on mountains or above precipitous rocks; such as the many peaks of Sinai, the lake on Haramuk in Kashmir, the cliffs of Rocamadour in Central France, which Piers Plowman mentions,[33] or the grey cone of Athos.  In a mild form such places may frequently be seen, in the pilgrimage churches and chapels which crown modest eminences beside many villages and towns of Catholic Europe:  akin no doubt to the high places and hill-altars where lingered the heathen worship that the Israelite priests and prophets were continually trying to exterminate.

[33] Right so, if thou be religious, renne thou never ferthere
To Rome ne to Roquemadoure:  but as thy rule techeth,
Holde thee to thine obedience:  that heighway is to heaven.

The third class of pilgrimage sites is of those which are sanctified through association with divinities or saints or relics:  Gaya in Bihar, with its pilgrims’ way leading pious Buddhists by long flights of steps up and down the circle of hills, like the great way at Bologna; Jerusalem, Rome, Canterbury, Treves; and Santiago (St. James) de Compostella, rendered attractive also by remote distance.  Or a settlement of hermits in a wilderness might become a place of pilgrimage, especially when death had heightened the fame enjoyed during their lives:  such as Gueremeh in Cappadocia, St. Bertrand among the Pyrenees, or Einsiedeln above the Lake of Lucerne, where in 1487 died Nicholas the Hermit, reputed to have lived for twenty years without food.  And we may make a special category for sacred houses; the Bait-ullah or Qaabah at Mecca, the house of the Virgin at Loretto, St. Columba’s at Glencolumbkill, and the house in which St. Francis died, in dei Angeli at Assisi.

In many cases there is definite evidence to show that pilgrimage sites remain sacred even when religions change.  Mecca was a resort of pilgrims in the first century B.C., 700 years before Muhammad.  The Central-Asian shrines visited by Buddhist pilgrims from China on their way to India, Fa-hsien in the fifth and Hsuan-tsang in the seventh century, are now appropriated to Islam.  The so-called foot-mark on Adam’s Peak in Ceylon has been attributed by Brahmans to Siva, by Buddhists to Sakyamuni, by Gnostics to Ieu, by Muhammadans to Adam, and by the Portuguese Christians to either St. Thomas or the eunuch of Candace, queen of Ethiopia.[34]

     [34] J.E.  Tennent’s Ceylon (1860), ii. 133, quoted in Yule’s
          Marco Polo, ed.  H. Cordier, 1903, ii. 321.