The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [85]
Returning to County Mayo would be a thrilling prospect too. I’d been there only once, 20 years ago, but stayed for weeks, so bewitched was I by its landscape and life. It was high on my list of places I’d enjoyed so much that I was nervous of returning, lest the experience prove anything other than utterly magical and shatter the precious memories. That 1991 Irish trip was possibly the happiest of my life, as I was 24 years old and had just waltzed out of the world of proper jobs, after barely two years of even trying. Two spiky guidebooks under my belt, published to near universal indifference, I was nonetheless convinced that the world would eagerly lap up my observations about it. Ireland was to be the first of an endless series of award-winning books by the firebrand young writer, and in the months leading up to it and my six weeks travelling around the country, I soaked myself in Irish history and literature and filled two massive notebooks with my earnest musings on it all. And there they stayed, the publishing industry proving strangely immune to their genius.
The venue and time for my pilgrimage presented themselves, and so did the method of transport to reach it. There was only one possible way to get to a Catholic pilgrimage in Mayo, and that was to fly into Knock Airport, the Virgin Mary’s own international aviation facility. As befits a name that sounds like the start of a joke, the airport has been the butt of incredulous laughter for decades. Since it opened a quarter of a century ago, it has had four names: Knock Airport, then the Monsignor Horan International, after the local priest who came up with the grand idea of sticking a runway on top of a foggy, boggy mountain in Mayo, then the Connaught Regional Airport, and now the Ireland West Airport Knock. And it’s nearest to Charlestown, not Knock.
Who’s there?
Absolutely feckin’ no-one, went the sardonic reply. The idea that folk would choose to fly into the peat bogs of western Ireland, and all because the local priest thought his village could do with its own airport, was an Irish joke that shot around the world in the 1970s and early 1980s. The people of County Mayo weren’t laughing though. They trusted Monsignor James Horan to come up with the goods; his track record certainly suggested he might. The Monsignor was devoutly local and a brilliant populist, capable of coming up with ever-grander schemes to enthuse his parishioners. In one of his earlier parishes at nearby Tooreen, he’d bullied the GPO in Dublin into opening a post office there, and then, convinced that it was partly a lack of social opportunity for young people that was driving them out of the west, built them an outsized dance hall. It became one of Ireland’s most famous venues of the 1950s and 1960s, though not entirely for the reasons Father Horan had anticipated. For over half a century, legend has persisted that one night the Devil himself attended a dance at the Tooreen Hall, whisking some local colleen off her feet before disappearing in a sulphurous cloud and a brief glimpse of cloven hooves. A drama of the supposed event was the 2009 Christmas-night blockbuster on TG4, the Irish-language TV station, and included some ageing gobshites insisting that they had witnessed Old Nick’s dirty dancing and malodorous departure one far-off night in 1958.
Difficult though it is to pick out hard truth from the mists of time and the even denser fog of Mayo mythmaking, a more prosaic explanation comes from a tract that had just been published at the time by the Catholic Truth Society, called The Devil at Dances. This had fulminated angrily against the Church organising sinful dances in country parishes by weaving a clumsy allegory about an actual visitation by the Horned One to a western village