The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [91]
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.