Moratinos and Terradillos de los Templares

Moratinos is a tiny village on the Meseta - the tableland - of Castilla-Leon. It's just outside the township of Sahagun and on the Camino Francés between Burgos and Leon. You'd probably need all those references to locate the place on a map!

I caught the train to get to Moratinos. It first headed to Ourense, a journey that took me four or five days to walk. The train did it in 40 minutes... It was a little odd to be travelling through the countryside I'd walked. The weather was overcast and misty, not unlike the weather when I'd walked the Camino through this part of the country.

There are about 20 full-time residents in Moratinos - although it boasts an albergue and a hostel which both compete for the pilgrim traffic. A couple of years ago a bar-restaurant opened too. So it's not entirely uncivilized here!

I'm a volunteer for a couple of weeks to work in the English Camino Chaplaincy which is organized by a Scotsman who lives in Santiago. A local resident, an American married to an Englishman, organises the chaplaincy here. I stay in a flat attached to their house and have most of my meals with them.

I open the tiny church here and greet pilgrims who visit, give them a stamp in their credential and then in the evenings, celebrate Mass in the nearby town of Terradillos. I go over there because the albergues there are larger and more people come to Mass. The American lady drives pilgrims across to Terradillos from the albergues in Moratinos.

I also celebrate the Sunday morning Masses for the locals. They're not big congregations - about 10 or 12 in Moratinos and maybe 35 in Terradillos. It's great being part of these communities - they're farming families. There's a dairy farm here, but most of the land is given over to arable farming.

Most of the houses are adobe - earth and straw or brick. There is little stone here so the houses are made of available materials. Consequently there are few ruins.

About halfway to Terradillos there was a medieval village called Villa Oreja or "Ear Village". There is no sign of it now. According to local legend it grew up around a monastery. Apparently the monks got tired of saying prayers and began to prey on pilgrims. Terradillos de los Templares is so called because the Knights Templar established themselves there to protect pilgrims - from the monks! They certainly succeeded - the monastery and the village have been erased from the land.