The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [90]
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