The Turtle Dove Pilgrimage

Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and selects The Turtle Dove Pilgrimage with singer Sam Lee and Will Parsons of the British Pilgrimage Trust.

Sam and Will lead 11 pilgrims on a journey across Sussex tracing the origins of the iconic folk song ‘The Turtle Dove’.

Over 100 years ago, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams travelled through Rusper in Sussex, collecting the stories and songs of the locals he encountered.

He stopped at the Plough Inn, where he set up his Edwardian recording equipment to capture the songs of the pub’s landlord, whose crackled voice and haunting melodies can still be heard today.

Vaughan Williams transformed one of the humble folk songs, The Turtle Dove, into a choral hit – extracting the song from Sussex and exporting it to the concert halls of London.

This Pilgrimage seeks to return the song to the land from which it was taken.

Producer: Claire Crofton

A TBI production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in March 2019.