In her shoes: Melanie Nazareth left London on foot in the midst of a heatwave on Sept. 5. Eight weeks later, she arrived in Glasgow in the biting cold, with soggy leaves squishing under her worn-in hikers. Nazareth walked the 500 or so miles with a group of pilgrims that snowballed from about 20 at the outset to 80 some days. They have come to Glasgow to protest against climate change and world leaders’ failure to act with more urgency.

“If you told me two years ago I’d be doing this, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Nazareth said when we met at a pub in downtown Glasgow. The 59-year-old lawyer is a “reluctant activist,” she said. She described herself as being awakened to the climate crisis in 2019 after meandering into a demonstration in London.

“It was like a switch flipped,” she said. She stopped driving a car and eating meat. She hasn’t been on an airplane since. “I knew last year I wanted to come to COP26, but the question was how to get there,” said Nazareth. A fellow member of the protest group Christian Climate Action suggested, half joking, that they walk there. “We all laughed,” she said. “My idea of physical exertion was walking to the train station.” But Nazareth couldn’t shake the idea. She and a few other pilgrims started plotting their route.

Walkers ranged in age from 20 to 74. Many of them were religious or spiritual, sharing a profound sense of moral obligation and—at least in Nazareth’s case—shame for letting the climate crisis get so severe. They walked some 16 kilometres a day, and hosted talks about global warming in towns along their route. They slept in church halls and community centres, and ate mostly lentils and rice.

Nazareth said the hike whipped her into shape. “Hills still kill me,” she conceded. The hardest part, though, was resigning her privacy. “This is all about sacrificing, isn’t it?” she said. “We give up a great deal to be activists, but this is something I just have to do.”

I asked Nazareth how she plans to return home. “Not walking,” she said. “I’ll take the train.”