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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