Focusing on the connections between space, place and pilgrimage, this work brings together geography, history, ethnography and mathematics, in a meticulously researched and erudite work. The second edition, undoubtedly very welcome, does not however, as the author says, update the information or the interpretations of the material made in the earlier version. One major addition is the inclusion of a section in the fifth chapter, which was not part of the earlier edition due to space constraints. Some of the names of the respondents ‘as well as some other potentially sensitive materials’ (p. xvii), have also been removed in this edition.
Edward Casey says, ‘Whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place—we are immersed in it and cannot do without it.’ In another work, he says that ‘place is open-textured, ever-altering, always challenging, never fixed…’.