THE ST. THOMAS Way heritage route from Swansea to Hereford encompasses a suite of bespoke multimedia resources designed to facilitate imaginative, affective, embodied engagement with medieval stories, characters, and beliefs, as participants explore the route and its thirteen core locations. This essay should be read alongside my introduction to the present volume, “Remaking Medieval Pilgrimage: The St. Thomas Way,” which gives a detailed account of the various digital and nondigital tools and strategies developed to catalyze encounters with multiple historical moments at sites on the Way. The resources were developed with the visitor experience as primary objective: privileging experiential, participatory encounters with the past, in place, rather than any abstract theoretical or academic reflections. And yet, through this practice-led, engagement-driven research, the capacity of the St. Thomas Way to contribute to, and extend, current scholarly conversations around time and temporalities has emerged as a key dimension of the project.

In the past two decades, theoretical discussion of time and temporalities has seen renewed attention and vigour— and much of the most innovative, pioneering work has come from medievalists. This essay— together with the introduction to this volume— offers a distinctively new, even radical, contribution to this flourishing theoretical field. In a sphere of enquiry often dominated by highly theoretical discussion at the most rarefied, sophisticated scholarly level, what can a practice-led project such as the St. Thomas Way add to critical thinking? What kinds of new insights can the applied scholarship of the St. Thomas Way project suggest, and how might it meet with and drive forward theoretical thinking? This essay seeks to explore those possibilities, and also to investigate how approaches to temporalities might be nuanced when place is drawn into critical focus alongside time. With multiple theories, varied conceptual models, and sometimes contradictory arguments from diverse scholarly perspectives, the complex subject of time and temporalities seems to demand an unconventional critical approach and form of writing. So, rather than a typical, linear essay, pursuing a central strand of argument, this chapter is structured more experimentally, as a way of exploring whether a different shape of academic writing— encompassing disparate sites of inspiration and critical engagement— might better serve an investigation into the complexities of time in place, and might more fully acknowledge the tensions, parallels, and divergences between varied approaches.