Anthony Seldon walks Gillespie’s Path for Peace

1000km along the Western Front

Sir Anthony Seldon, historian and former Headmaster ofWellington College, is about to walk the 1000km The Western Front Way, a path across the Western Front, first envisaged by Alexander Gillespie, an old boy of Cargilfield and Winchester College.

2nd Lieutenant Alexander Douglas Gillespie of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders writes a letter to his Headmaster at Winchester from the front line to tell of his vision of ‘a via sacra’ (a sacred road), a route for peace between the battle lines.

“when peace comes, our government might combine with the French government to make one long avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea….I would make a fine broad road in the ‘No-Mans Land’ between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot and plant trees for shade and fruit trees, so that the soil should not altogether be waste. Then I would like to send every man, woman and child in Western Europe on a pilgrimage along that Via Sacra so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.”

Gillespie’s great nephew, Tom Heap, a trustee of the Western Front Way, opened our AstroTurf named after Gillespie in 2019.

Anthony Seldon writes:

That first step tomorrow of the million I need to take will, I know, be the hardest. It has taken eight years to get here, ever since I first came across a letter by a First World War junior officer, AD Gillespie, written to his former headmaster at Winchester College.

It was the harsh spring of 1915 and Gillespie — freshly out of school — found himself on the line near where his only brother had been killed the previous year. No doubt that loss was in his mind when he wrote to his headmaster that if he survived the war he wanted a 1,000km walk to be created, from the Swiss border — where the front line ended — to the English Channel. He wanted every man and woman in western Europe to follow this route as a reminder — from the “silent witnesses” on both sides — of where war leads.

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