by Mike Parker
I’ve long ago lost contact with the Reverend, and the Professor is, I gather from the all-mighty Google, now dead. I thought of them both fondly as I surveyed the stark walls of Ballintober Abbey. The lavish new biblical scenes that had so appalled the Rev had mellowed with age, though not as much as I had. In my 1991 notebook, I’d called Ballintober ‘the Alton Towers of the Catholic faith’, but it all looked rather sweet to me now. In Elizabeth’s House, the crockery-filled cave that had so amused me back then, I read an explanation sheet that detailed the Irish concept of muintearas, roughly translated as ‘hospitality’. ‘In the old Gaelic tradition the door was left open and food and drink were left on the table for the passing stranger . . . for often, often, often went the Christ in the stranger’s guise. Muintearas signifies welcome, warmth, hospitality and care.’
Two hundred yards up the road in my B&B, I was receiving muintearas by the bucket-load. I’d booked months earlier, as soon as I decided to walk the Tóchar Phádraig, but was dimly aware when I got there that there was some degree of surprise at my arrival. They had a family wedding going on, as well as a houseful of Dutch tourists. No matter: I was fixed with a pot of tea, home-made scones and fruit cake, and eventually asked if I’d mind taking their teenage daughter’s bedroom for the weekend. The girl in question was sitting in the kitchen in her pyjamas, texting her mates and telling us what a fierce night the previous evening, the wedding day of her cousin, had been. She gave away her bedroom without a mutter of complaint – ‘Ah sure, I’ll just sleep where I fall this weekend.’ Only the next day did her mum, truly the most capable hostess I’ve ever met, admit that they’d been expecting me the following weekend.
Reek Sunday didn’t so much dawn as become gradually less grey. ‘Ach, it’s sure to clear,’ said my landlady, peering out into the drizzle. I was too excited to care, and wolfed down my breakfast before heading up to the Abbey to join my fellow pilgrims. I was hooking up with Patsy, a friend from Galway, who’d done the Tóchar five Reek Sundays earlier, with around 15 others. Now there were four times as many of us shuffling around the massive nave with our sandwiches and drinks. ‘Amazing what a recession will do for people’s faith,’ whispered Patsy.
Father Frank Fahey appeared, to give us the pre-pilgrimage pep talk. The rector of the Abbey, he is a priest surely cast from the same redoubtable Mayo mould as Monsignor Horan. At the Abbey for the past 30 years, it was he who rebuilt it from a shell, who designed the biblical scenes around the churchyard that had so horrified my Anglican friend and who, piece by piece, had reconnected all the paths of the Tóchar Phádraig to Croagh Patrick. Now in his late seventies, he still fizzed with a wild energy and a warm humanity, sending us on our way with prayer, pensiveness and some cracking good jokes. We were not to complain at all, he told us mock-sternly. Whatever the ailment, however sharp the pain, we must turn our moans into the phrase ‘Thanks be to God’. His final point was clear: ‘And don’t forget. This is not a walk; it is a pilgrimage.’
Along the 22 miles of the Tóchar, Fr Fahey has installed 113 stiles, each marked with a black cross, and when we climbed over these, he said, we should offer up a prayer. I was still struggling to differentiate the idea of a pilgrimage from a mere walk: so many of my finest walks I’d thought of as pilgrimages anyway, irrespective of whether the destination had been a church, a stone circle, a view to make you sing, a place to swim or a couple of pints of Parson’s Downfall and a bag of chips. Walking with that sense of intent and focus, of revelling in the mud and stones and twigs of now, while also looking forward to the destination, is the only way to do it, and I couldn’t think of a particularly new frame of mind to call up for the task of doing my first official pilgrimage.
Luckily, help was on hand at the first stile, taking us out of the Abbey grounds. A plaque to launch the pilgrim on his way has a wonderful quotation taken from the fifteenth-century Book of Lismore:
‘Going on a pilgrimage without change of heart brings no reward from God. For it is by practising virtue and not mere motion of the feet that we will be brought to heaven.’
The stiles passed quickly and – when I remembered – prayerfully; the day stayed soft, with no long-range visibility. Everyone’s mood seemed good, great in fact, plump with hope and the joy of release from real life. Because the group had been so unusually large, we’d been split into four and sent off at intervals. The real keen ones, those with flashy cagoules and proper pilgrimage staffs, pushed forward and disappeared into the folds of green. I left with the last group, mostly locals, save for me and an American student who was writing a thesis on Irish pilgrimages. We ploughed on, sometimes chatty, sometimes silent. At one stage, we were discussing Irish politics, and the level of hatred towards the politicians who had so carelessly broken their economy was bubbling furiously. Talking about a particular minister, one man cursed loudly, ‘Oh, he’s a complete and utter . . . thanks be to God!’. The phrase became our bleep machine.
You can find the Tóchar Phádraig sporadically marked and annotated in Gothic script on nineteenth-century OS maps. Those tended to be the most obvious parts of the path, rows of ancient flags suddenly appearing beneath our feet in farflung corners of fields, bogs and woods. At these points I was acutely aware of feeling a deep and resonant echo as we passed, the footfall of centuries. This had been a main route into the far west for everyone: not just priests and pilgrims, but soldiers, bailiffs, farmers, murderers, mourners, pillagers, villagers, the pampered and starving alike. The Tóchar brushes past numerous ghost villages from the famine years of the 1840s: Mayo was the county worst affected of all. In 1841, the county’s population was nearly 400,000. It had halved by 1901, and is around 125,000 today.
Although Mayo is a hilly county, the Tóchar remains relatively flat until the mountain itself, stretching its way across a landscape little better described than by the Saw Doctors as a ‘soft and craggy bogland’. The line comes from their anthem ‘The Green and Red of Mayo’, and it had been whirring through my head continuously since the plane had touched down three days earlier at Knock. It’s a lot more evocative a description than the next line, about the county’s ‘tall, majestic hills’. I mentioned that I couldn’t shake the song from my brain. ‘Ah yes, the hymn to Mayo, sung by the band from Galway,’ a fellow pilgrim sniffed.
We pounded lanes, cut through hedges, tiptoed across rickety plank bridges, hopped across flagstones in bogs, tramped down newly laid gravel, ducked down between dry stone walls and swished gorse, bracken and nettles out of the way. Gargantuan cattle, udders heavy, chewed and stared as we passed. Although the path is only formally open for a few days of the year, it has the full complement not just of stiles, but fingerposts and direction pointers as well. It was a rare vista that didn’t include one or the other, to the point that we were lulled into a false sense of security and, at one stage, got hopelessly lost when none could be seen. It happened again, not long after the half-way break in the old monastic village of Aghagower, to the point where we, already the last group to go, were seriously lagging.
A 15-year-old Ford Fiesta came bouncing down the lane from the opposite direction. It stopped, and Father Fahey’s face appeared out of the driver’s window. ‘Are you lot the last?’ he asked. ‘You’re a terrible long way behind, y’know. Come on, split yourselves in two and I’ll give you a lift the next mile. Some of the others are already arriving at the Boheh Stone for Mass.’ This didn’t seem right. How could we footsore band of pilgrims possibly climb into a car? Someone else voiced the same concern: ‘But Father, isn’t that cheating?’ ‘Ah no, it’s not,’ he smoothly replied. ‘Not if I’m taking you.’ I was in the second batch to be transported: three fellas in the back, me in the front seat and the poor American girl scrunched awkwardly on to my lap. ‘Getting close is all part of being on a pilgrimage,’ Father Fahey grinned at us, as the car scraped up the lane, its chassis periodically glancing off the tarmac. At one stage, he had to conduct a savage hill start, and the smell of burned-out clutch
heralded his arrival for the rest of the day.
The Boheh Stone is the highlight of the route. A huge outburst of a rock, it is covered in cup and ring marks. According to Father Fahey’s own book about the Tóchar, it is ‘an old druidic stone probably used as a mass rock by St Patrick’, and that its many inscribed circles ‘show that it was associated with the worship of the sun’. That was written a couple of years before a local man discovered that, when viewing the pyramid cone of Croagh Patrick from the Boheh Stone, on 18 April and 24 August the setting sun rolled precisely from the mountain’s summit down its northern slope, a spectacular phenomenon that lasts 20 minutes or so. Together with the winter solstice, these two dates divided the year into near-equal thirds and could well have been crucial in divining the agricultural cycle.
It was a strange thrill then to arrive at this most pagan of stones and see Father Fahey arranging his cloth and chalice across its table top. With his vestment on, he swung into celebrating Mass, after checking who amongst us wanted communion. Not being a Catholic, nor indeed a Christian, I abstained, as did about half a dozen others, but I was happy to chuck in the odd Amen here and there, and mumbled along with the Lord’s Prayer, a creed so hammered into my brain that I’ll still doubtless be able to dribble it out when absolutely everything else has been wiped clean from my memory. I’ve only ever been to a handful of Catholic Masses, and they always send a prickle down my spine. In the Church of England of my childhood, people enunciated like Radio 4 continuity announcers, even in prayer, but in Catholic rituals, everyone seems to close their throat down to produce an invocation that’s half-voiced, half-hummed. It’s strangely effective, and I remembered being both moved and slightly freaked out on hearing thousands doing it together at the Knock shrine two decades earlier, and, a few years before that, when I went with my mate Liam and his family to see the Pope at Coventry Airport. Not being able to make out the individual words is an advantage as far as I’m concerned: the sound and the feeling are all that matter, washing over me in waves of unfathomable mystery, and I don’t start getting annoyed by the overly pious or bigoted bits. It’s the same reason that I love going to any religious service in a language I don’t understand. Choral Evensong in St David’s Cathedral has been ruined now that I’ve learned Welsh, so I’m always on the hunt for a bit of Latin.
Leaving Boheh, refreshed physically by chocolate and spiritually by Father Fahey’s stone-topped Mass, we were within spitting distance of the Reek, but you wouldn’t have known it. The great mountain had shown us not so much as a glimpse all day: despite being nearly on it, you’d be pushed to guess where it sat in our horizon. Down every lane that we’d walked, houses called Reek View and the like only rubbed it in. Before long we were steadily climbing up the lane that takes you to the back of the mountain. Most of the thousands of Reek Sunday pilgrims climb from the other side, from the bayside village of Murrisk: there was just us and the emergency services on the landward side. The grey day had solidified now into thick fog and teeming rain, the flashing blue lights of the occasional ambulance looming through the murk only making it even more surreal and jangling our nerves. Chatter had evaporated: everyone was now concentrating on every step.
The age range of our band of pilgrims stretched from the teens to around 70, with an assortment of disabilities and difficulties therein. Mindful of what we’d been told, no-one complained, despite the aching limbs and the bleak provocation of the elements. A couple of times, I caught grimaces of real agony on people’s faces, but they’d catch me looking, and those faces would break instead into a smile or a grin, and would ask me how I was doing. In them, I saw some definition of faith, of persistence at all costs and through untold difficulties, and it floored me. I was still on a walk; they were definitely on a pilgrimage. The lane climbed higher, mile after mile, the rain getting steadily worse. When we reached the last point before heading up the sheer slopes on to the still invisible mountain, Patsy’s mobile bleeped. It was a text from his wife, telling him that the radio news was ordering people not to try going up the Reek, as it was too dangerous. There were a fair few Mountain Rescue people nearby, for this was their access point too, and they confirmed the order. We could cross over the shoulder of the mountain to meet our bus at Murrisk, but we shouldn’t try the difficult last bit of the ascent up the cone to the summit. Like being told to get in Father Fahey’s car for a mile, I was quietly relieved and happy to acquiesce.
I’m not sure that I could have made it anyway. To reach the shoulder of the mountain needed a sheer climb of almost a thousand feet, and it killed me. Each footstep felt like my last as we trudged and slid up the stony path, washed over by black, peaty mud. A few of our crowd insisted that they’d still like to attempt the summit, despite the warnings. As if in response, a team of day-glo-jacketed paramedics suddenly manifested through the fog, carrying someone off the mountain in a body bag, on a stretcher. This was the only way they could rescue injured pilgrims, for the conditions had grounded the air ambulance. We watched in silence as they passed in a well-orchestrated two-step down the slope. No-one mentioned wanting to get to the top after that.
Our little path zig-zagged its way up on to the shoulder of Croagh Patrick, where we met the far larger, and incomparably busier, main pilgrim path from Murrisk to the top. Later reports stated that over 20,000 people had climbed the Reek that day, and although it was by now quite late in the afternoon, there were still hundreds huffing and grunting their way up and down. Photos of the Reek, even from quite some distance, make this main path look like a flesh wound gouged out of the mountain’s flank, a sensation that holds even when you’re on it. The track is vast, gaping and as hard as nails. Loose shale and mud slide down at the slightest provocation. And there’s none greater than 20,000 pilgrims in one day, many terribly unfit and struggling, battling their way up the mountain and dislodging yet more loose rockery with their sticks and boots.
Or their bare feet, of course. Within a minute of joining the main throng, I’d seen my first barefoot climber, that celebrated, and rather derided, icon of Croagh Patrick. In recent years, the authorities had been doing their utmost to dissuade the practice, but this was God stuff, way beyond their boundaries, and folk carried on regardless. As we started the long clamber down, we overtook half a dozen or more in the first couple of minutes. I slyly scrutinised all the bare feet as I passed. They were muddy, inevitably, but I was slightly disappointed not to see any sliced to ribbons by the unyielding mountain. The American student and I were both fascinated by the phenomenon, and we ambushed an old fella, well over 60, who was nimbly skinny-dipping his feet over the rocks in front of us.
I wanted him, of course, to be as mad as snakes (or whatever is the Irish equivalent, since St Patrick banished them all from the island in his forty-day stay on the Reek sixteen centuries ago). In truth, he was glowing with an inner joy that was infectious. Not only that: he was more surefooted, curling his toes expertly around the rocks and squishing them firmly into the mud, than I was in my clumpy 150-quid size-ten boots. He fair danced down that mountain, while I skidded and tumbled down like a drunkard.
After the bus ride back to Ballintober, goodbyes were said with genuine depth. We’d come together, a band of strangers, for just one day. But what a day to share. I’d expected piety, perhaps even a little doctrinal dogma. All I’d heard, seen and felt throughout the day was quiet strength, deep affection and great hope, as well as much easy laughter and camaraderie. Over the next 24 hours, though, it dawned that the job wasn’t yet done, and that I had to reach the peak of the Reek.
Patsy in Galway felt the same, and a day later he and his wife Helen drove up to Westport, picked me up and we headed to Murrisk. Although not as wet as Reek Sunday, there was that indefinably westerly sensation of claggy greyness, to the point where you could barely tell whether it was actually raining or not. At Murrisk, the full force of the Reek phenomenon is unleashed: cafés, a bar, Catholic tat stalls, stick merchants (buy one for €2, rent it for
€1) and mumbling zealots all dotted around a vast car park full of people adjusting each other’s gaiters and looking nervously upwards. I’d been slightly sniffy about Croagh Patrick, pointing out to anyone who would listen that it’s only 2,510 feet high, and that I can go up and down a bigger mountain than that before breakfast at home (not that I ever have, but the possibility’s there). Here, though, you are starting at sea level, right on the shores of Clew Bay and its speckle of glacial drumlins arching from the water like a pod of basking whales. Furthermore, the path is no gentle amble. It lurches heavenwards, hurling contour after contour back to earth with god-like fury. In length, from the car park to the summit, the path is less than two miles, a terrifically short scramble in which to gain two and a half thousand feet in height.
Two days after Reek Sunday, there were hundreds of us climbing the mountain. Anything up to quarter of a million do it every year. Loftily spurned by ‘proper’ climbers and purist hill walkers, Croagh Patrick is the Princess Di of mountains, the People’s Peak, and in many cases, the only mountain that some will ever ascend. To do so is an integral part of being Irish, a damp green Camino conducted for both cultural and spiritual uplift. The mountain was special before Christianity, it has remained so through sixteen centuries of boisterous Church rule, and in these early days of a kind of neo-pagan secularism, its appeal and its pull have not dimmed in the slightest – if anything, quite the reverse. Even those who have long ago abandoned the Church after its miserable succession of scandals still look to the Reek as a penance that must be done. On both days, I was struck by the gangs of teenage mates, the young families and the couples in their twenties who were heading up. Though I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t horrified by the rubbish the buggers leave strewn all over the sacred peak.