ONCE, JORGE LUIS BORGES fulfilled a lifelong wish to visit Hannibal, Missouri — the birthplace of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. The blind Argentinian writer asked to be taken down to the Mississippi, and, bending to touch the water, whispered: “Now my pilgrimage is complete.” My own visit to Hannibal was less spiritual. As well as the boyhood home, the little town now contains the MT family restaurant, Tom Sawyer’s fence, MT’s father’s law office and any number of MT gift shops.

The ladies in the Steamboat café were proud of their handmade stuffed writer, designed to draw in the tourists, who pose — laughing as I did — with the effigy. The industry proves literature useful on more than one level.

To gaze at the Mississippi is a truer way of reaching the soul of Twain. Similarly, John Steinbeck’s humanity is better sensed on derelict Route 66, the “Mother Road”, than in Cannery Row’s tourist tat.

You could hang out in the San Francisco or Greenwich Village haunts of the Beat poets, or pull off at any seedy bar along miles of American blacktop and swig a cold Corona, knowing that Jack Kerouac would have thought it hipper that you’re on the road yourself. This is about mood. Such journeys require an imaginative input beyond heritage hero-worship; they understand that a writer’s mind need not be epitomised by one place.

Worship at a literary shrine can take many forms: gazing at a blue plaque in London; joining the throngs who turn Dove Cottage into a babel that the Wordsworths would have loathed; strolling through Laugharne clutching a copy of Under Milk Wood, so that the rubicund jollity of Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen drowns out Mr and Mrs Dylan Thomas’s torment. Why do we do it, sometimes making detours of many miles to a birthplace or a grave?

Do we hope that through the genius loci, the spirit of place, we will gain insight into the work itself? Certainly, to follow the Lorna Doone trail on Exmoor enhances R. D. Blackmore’s thrilling, underrated novel. What better way to gain insight into a writer’s creativity than to walk in their path? I made my first literary pilgrimage at the age of 20, to the Yeats Summer School at Sligo when, camped behind rain-lashed dunes, it was easy to visualise Cuchulain battling with the stormy ocean. I communed by the poet’s grave, recited Innisfree by Lough Gill, climbed Ben Bulben and took a stone to the top of Knocknarea to add to the cairn of Maeve, the warrior queen. Everything fed my idolatry.

Yeats wasn’t born in Sligo, but absorbed a passion for his mother’s birthplace and said it had influenced his life the most. No wonder he wanted to be buried there. Frank O’Connor wrote: “It was part of the (life as) work of art as he saw it, that he who took inspiration from the landscape and people of Sligo should return to them in the end.”

You could mark the map of Britain through literature and use the routes as a reason to re-read. Crabbe in the East, the Brontës in Yorkshire, Burns and Scott north of the border, Blake and Dickens in London, R. S. Thomas in Wales, Thomas Hardy in Dorset . . . these are just some of those who transformed landscape into art, the reverse alchemy being that words which invoke a particular place can transcend the ugliness of today — but only for travellers who leave the ring roads and seek with love what still remains. The implacable moors do not change, no matter what surrounds them — so the soul of Heathcliffe perpetually cries in the wind over Haworth churchyard.

In the early Eighties I made many pilgrimages to the Midlands landscape where George Eliot would roam with her land agent father, observing country life in a state of transition. During 25 years of exile in London, estranged from her family, she revisited the beloved “central plain” in her mind’s eye, and wrote: “There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born.

” In the small, drab towns and unpicturesque villages of the Nuneaton area you can trace her beginnings. This is the flat land of plain-spoken people whose very accent complains at life’s shortcomings, but knows there is no choice but to get on with it.

Sometimes a single site encapsulates genius — like Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. Recently I returned to the Quantocks to recall the high point of the poet’s life. Some of his finest poems were written between 1797 and 1799 in the tiny cottage, before life folded in on him. My favourite, Frost at Midnight, is full of optimism, as he sits by the dying embers watching his baby in the crib, and imagines for Hartley a happier life than his own.

A literary pilgrimage should be made with soul, too — and if it is a challenge, so much the better. The first time I was in New Mexico there was no time to make the detour to where D. H. Lawrence’s ashes are buried. Last November I refused to miss it, though snow lay thick and the place was five miles down a dirt road. The ranch that Mabel Dodge Luhan gave the Lawrences in 1924 lies 15 miles north of his beloved Taos. The writer spent only 22 months there, yet New Mexico “changed me for ever”.

The couple’s attempt to live according to ideas of freedom was a disaster, and Lawrence’s short life and tormented marriage ended at 44, in the South of France. Frieda went back to live in Taos with her Italian lover Ravagli, and it was he who brought back the ashes and built the shrine. The ugly little building in the trees has yellow walls, a blue wooden roof and a round window painted with a rough sunflower. A crude concrete phoenix forms the altar.

Happily, I bent to lay my “wreath” — a small chilli ristra to symbolise the passion of Lawrence’s life and work — wondering what all this meant, so far from Nottingham. Then came the epiphany. If a holy pilgrimage should make life more meaningful, then those of us deprived of God can hope that to commune imaginatively with the souls of those whose words have changed lives is to approach our own salvation.

What's more..

• A Writer’s Britain by Margaret Drabble (Thames and Hudson)
• A Literary Pilgrim in England by Edward Thomas (out of print but available from www.abebooks.co.uk)
• On the Writer’s Trail: 20 Great Literary Journeys ed. Christina Hardyment (National Trust)
• Also try the following sites: www.wordsworthcountry.com www.nuneatonandbedworth.gov.uk/visiting/eliot.asp
  www.bronte-country.com

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