The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [84]
The Celtic corners of our islands seemed to offer a better chance of faith and fun. One of the great realisations about Wales, after ten years of living there, was how Christianity had cannily absorbed and adopted the older ways. Rugged little stone churches, seemingly sprung from the rock on which they sat, had often been built on sites that had already accrued a spiritual significance over centuries, perhaps millennia, before the missionaries arrived. As it is in the buildings, so it seemed in the doctrine: a far greater sense of organic absorption. My local parish priest, a man of belligerent vision and effervescent charisma, wrote a book on the many manifestations of the Goddess in our culture, and has built a little chapel adjoining his house that bursts with gilted icons and incense, a fusion of Eastern Orthodoxy, Hinduism and Christ in a damp Welsh meadow. I’d found comparable fusions in the Pictish kingdom of north-east Scotland, in the bypassed bits of Cornwall and, once you peeled back and peered under the festering fundamentalism, throughout Ireland.
Ireland! That was it. If there was one place in these islands where I might find the Christ and the craic, it was the Emerald Isle, where the church and the pub remain as one. Once that realisation had come, the answer to my quest became obvious. Much as I share the scepticism towards what Jim Perrin calls the ‘capitalist construct’ of our obsession with ‘conquering’ the highest, the largest or the longest, when it came to a proper pilgrimage, size really was everything. I needed the biggest, most tumultuous there was, and that could only mean Reek Sunday up Croagh Patrick.
There are lots of ingredients that make up the perfect holy mountain, but the single biggest is its shape. A sacred mount must draw the eye and hold it there, in awe, in aesthetic delight and in slight terror too. It must embody both beauty and a certain haughtiness, which is why so many great holy mountains sit at some distance from any other sizeable peaks, for they are scene-stealers and do not like to share the stage. Symmetry is good, even if seen only from one or two vantage points. These too will acquire subsidiary holy status and become outlying pin-pricks of the light that generation after generation of worshipper has accorded the peak itself. Looking from the mountain from other angles, it is often best if it appears in many different shapes and guises, a reminder of the shape-shifting truths at the heart of any faith system. Travel the full circle around a holy mountain and it should, in turn, appear forbidding and welcoming, impenetrable and comely, and all the time iridescently beautiful.
Croagh Patrick, or the Reek as it’s known locally, succeeds on all fronts. A 2,510ft (765m) cone of quartz, it rears out of the landscape at the bottom of the island-spattered Clew Bay on the wild coast of County Mayo. The rounded shoulders of the Connemara mountains sit at a discreet distance, leaving Croagh Patrick to wallow in its own glory, commanding land, sea and air – not that you can always tell which is which. The boundaries between them fuzz in the ever-changing light, as sea mists roll in, clouds billow over, sunlight bursts through in day-glo shafts and rainbows shimmer briefly into life. No-one can resist the holy pull of the Reek. To climb it is as much a part of the Irish identity as is doing the Hajj to Mecca for a Muslim. Especially on Reek Sunday, the final weekend of July, a date that harks back to the ancient Celtic harvest festival of Lughnasa, when anything between twenty and thirty thousand people sweat and grind their way up its unyielding slopes. And although the Reek’s origins as