I should admit that historical writing is not my usual terrain. I tend to reach for personal essay, fiction and poetry—typically light on footnotes. So it says something that Someone Else’s Saint, a book rich in historical inquiry, was not only a delight to read, but also inspired an improvised pilgrimage of my own.
In 2019, Dr. Matthew Anderson organized a small group of Canadians along the Whithorn Way, a 1600 year-old pilgrimage route through the Scottish Lowlands to the shrine of St. Ninian. Three years later, relocated to Nova Scotia, Anderson finds the mysterious Ninian waiting there, too. The book alternates between these two geographies, as Anderson walks a second, self-devised pilgrimage, from Pomquet Beach to Antigonish, which he names the Nova Scotia Ninian Way.
Possibly why this book appealed to me so much is that Anderson doesn’t recite the past, so much as paint it: a phantom ship, haunted woods weaving Gaelic and Indigeneous spirit stories, a bishop mistaken for a pirate. Page after page, the Scottish Gaels and Picts, and Nova Scotia’s Acadians and Mi’kmaq, are all brought to life. Anderson has the historian’s discipline and the storyteller’s art. Many of the chapter titles themselves are an adventure: “The Soggy Walker,” “A Gaelic Salmon,” “Paradise Between Two-Star Motels.”
The unfolding story is consistently attentive to the peoples displaced by the histories Anderson is tracing — the settler-colonial undercurrent running through both Scotland’s and Nova Scotia’s pasts, and the unfinished reckoning owed to those who were pushed out to make room for the stories that got told instead. He doesn’t treat this as separate—it’s woven into the walking itself. It is present in nearly every landscape he describes, tracking down and airing out betrayals and broken promises over hundreds of years. It reads as truly devotional work, and something he demonstrates as an opportunity to be found in pilgrimage. And in some part, because he is a delightful storyteller with an eye for the whimsical, when he drops into a serious matter, it lands with deserved weight.
Anderson does have a winning sense of humour — dry, observational, never at anyone’s expense but his own — and an unusual generosity toward the people he meets. Fellow pilgrims arrive on the page soaked, blistered, stubborn, and come alive as wonderfully human. In the chapter, “Sunk Cost Fallacies,” the reader is taken on an adventure as Anderson and his companions lose the path in open fields, then find themselves fighting through a hedgerow thick with thorns and nettles, only to be driven back the way they came straight into a rising gale. The scene is rendered such that a reader can feel the wind and the sting underfoot — the kind of writing that puts you in the field right beside the miserable pilgrims. True to the rhythm of their journey, the ordeal meets its end in a pub, advertising “Bar Meals Served” that, of course, has no kitchen. As Anderson says, “walking is a kind of voluntary asceticism” (p. 80), so the complaints are minimal and the setbacks are served up with a wry humour.
His vivid descriptiveness is not reserved only for the trials and tribulations. Lovely afternoons, scenes of beauty, and pictures of home in Antigonish jump off the page. It leaves the reader longing for the ocean to see those “mesmerizing wavelets of the sparkling strait”(p. 53), to taste the fishcakes and to smell the salt on the air. It left me a bit homesick for the coast I was pulled away from many years ago. It also inspired me to learn about the land I travel (which represents a real change for me, and about time).
It leaves the reader longing for the ocean to see those “mesmerizing wavelets of the sparkling strait”(p. 53), to taste the fishcakes and to smell the salt on the air.
I didn’t expect a work this rooted in Scottish and Nova Scotian history to leave me thinking about my own geography, but it did. Reading Someone Else’s Saint, I found myself beginning to improvise a pilgrimage of my own toward the two landscapes that feel like home: Ireland and Cape Cod.
Ah, but what about Ninian? Fair question. Anderson himself says he encourages his students to put on “detective hats”(p. 44), and it lines up that this story of the nebulous Ninian reads as a detective story. Without giving too much away, I would say that the chase, the gradual unearthing, and the meaning-making in the stubborn lack of certainty were most satisfying. It is transportive, and a gift to remember that it is almost always more about the journey than the destination. If we choose to pay attention, we can enrich our sense of place and community wherever we are—even right here at home.
In a tale woven around finding an elusive saint, connection to place, the warmth in community, and the power of the story are what I found—such a pleasure.
Originally from Saskatchewan (Treaty Four territory) and arriving in Nova Scotia via Montreal, England, and Ireland, Matthew R. Anderson is Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He has walked ancient pilgrimage paths and inaugurated new ones in Spain, Austria, Norway, Scotland, England, Ireland, Iceland, Quebec, western Canada, and the Maritimes. He teaches, researches, and writes about history and pilgrimage. His 2024 bestseller, The Good Walk, tells of the long treks he initiated with others across the prairies to help recover traditional First Nation, Métis, and settler trails. Matthew’s podcast is “Pilgrimage Stories from Up and Down the Staircase” and his walking blog is somethinggrand.ca.
Matthew lives with his wife Dr. Sara Parks in Pomquet, Nova Scotia. Someone Else’s Saint is his sixth book.
Publisher: Pottersfield Press (April 15, 2025)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 222 pages
ISBN: 9781990770692
Colleen O’Toole is an occupational therapist with a counseling practice in Hamilton, Ontario.
She is an Assistant Clinical Professor (Adjunct) in the Faculty of Health Sciences, School of
Rehabilitation Science at McMaster University. Colleen is the creator of Let’s Walk Home™, an
integrative pilgrimage counseling program and the co-founder of the Global Pilgrim Salon—an
online space for pilgrimage conversation. She is also the author of Restoring Joy: 40 Days and
40 Nights on the Camino de Santiago, a work of creative non-fiction which describes the lived
experience and trauma of alienation, and the healing power of pilgrimage.
