SINCE the early Middle Ages it has attracted pilgrims from across Europe, with a resurgence in interest in recent decades fuelling an explosion in trekking tourism worth millions.
Now, Scotland is looking to replicate Spain's world famous Camino de Santiago with its own trail following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims from the country's western fringe to the east coast.
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Billed as the 'Caledonian Camino', the 185 route would linking two of Scotland's most iconic religious sites, Iona and St Andrews. It would also include stop-offs in towns including Oban, Crieff and Tyndrum.
It has also the backing of one of the SNP Government's leading ministers, environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham who has been promoting the plan for several years.
In all, the group promoting the pilgrimage is working on five individual walking routes across the country. The 70-mile Fife Pilgrim Way, which will link Culross and North Queensferry on the Firth of Forth with St Andrews, has been back by the Heritage Lottery Fund with £400,000 and should be established by 2018.
The Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum (SPRF), a collection of 60 groups and individuals, hopes to use the Fife scheme as a platform for its long-term ambition of a coast-to-coast walk, which would still require permission from landowners, way-marks & interpretation sites and links with both public transport and accommodation.
A potential rival to the West Highland Way, head of the Forum's steering group, Nick Cooke, said the pilgrim routes had generated religious and secular interest and would be "attractive to people of Christian faiths and none".
Mr Cooke, who has developed the proposals over the past seven years, said: "We're part of a European movement reviving pilgrimages and its attracting people looking to discover a spiritual dimension but with walking and cycling increasing popular and support by the Government our efforts are accelerating.
"Of course work is still required on the routes. Right now, the journey west of Killin involves much walking on roads or replicating the original pilgrims and taking a boat.
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"It needs an infrastructure, transport links for the many who will only want to walk part of the route, and to be interpreted. Our discussions have included local tourism businesses, social enterprises, churches and many secular organisations and individuals."
The Camino de Santiago sees around 200,000 pilgrims annually trek across northern Spain to the Galician city of Santiago, home to relics claimed to be the bones of St James.
Scotland has a deep tradition of medieval pilgrimages until the late 16th century when the Reformation brought them to a halt. Iona, the symbolic centre of Scottish Christianity, has attracted pilgrims since its founder, St Columba, landed on the island in the 6th Century.
Mr Cooke described the Fife route as "coming full circle", explaining how St Andrews Cathedral, then the largest stone building in Scotland, had been a huge lure in the Middle Ages while the early monks were the pioneers of the area's coal mining tradition.
Ms Cunningham has been part of a steering group promoting a section of the Fife route, called the Three Saints Way and charting the journeys of three Celtic saints, St Fillan, St Serf and St Kessog.
She told the Scottish Catholic Observer: “The whole route I think is a tremendous narrative about Scotland and Scotland’s history. It describes the kind of change from the Celtic Church in Iona right through to the high medieval Catholic ruins at St Andrews.
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“That’s how Scotland grew, from the west through to the east, so there’s the ecclesiastical history with all of that in our landscape. The place names all the way through reflect that, that spread of Christianity from the west right through, across not just geography but time as well.
“What’s happened more recently is that Scottish Natural Heritage has now taken on the idea because they’re now looking at national trails. That doesn’t mean to say that there will be a top-down development of it.
“Different people will get different things out of it. People who’ve got a strong sense of their spiritual past and the history of Scotland are going to get a strong feeling of that out of it because it is Iona to St Andrews, it’s linking that change from the Celtic church through to the Roman Church."
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