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By Root 354 0

of us climbing the mountain. Anything up to quarter of a million do it every year. Loftily spurned by ‘proper’ climbers and purist hill walkers, Croagh Patrick is the Princess Di of mountains, the People’s Peak, and in many cases, the only mountain that some will ever ascend. To do so is an integral part of being Irish, a damp green Camino conducted for both cultural and spiritual uplift. The mountain was special before Christianity, it has remained so through sixteen centuries of boisterous Church rule, and in these early days of a kind of neo-pagan secularism, its appeal and its pull have not dimmed in the slightest – if anything, quite the reverse. Even those who have long ago abandoned the Church after its miserable succession of scandals still look to the Reek as a penance that must be done. On both days, I was struck by the gangs of teenage mates, the young families and the couples in their twenties who were heading up. Though I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t horrified by the rubbish the buggers leave strewn all over the sacred peak.

It’s a really tough climb: relentless and demanding, saving the worst for last. That scramble up the cone, sliding over ball-bearing scree slopes to the summit, is as tough climbing as you’ll get almost anywhere, for there is nothing to grip on to and the gradient is sheer. Again, smiles and words of encouragement lifted my knackered legs. Clouds hung obstinately over the summit, so there was no chance of getting the dazzling view of Clew Bay, but that didn’t matter. The sense of achievement and fulfilment as the grotty little hilltop chapel hoved into view through the mist sent me soaring; the view on top of that might have been a bit too much. It means also that I’ll have to come back and do it again: the next time in the hours up to sunrise. I could see why so many people did this time after time, treading the same path with new hope. It was inspiring, moving and amazing fun. Mrs Doyle would be very disappointed.

While many fine paths play up to our sense of the spiritual, there are a whole load of others whose existence is more explicitly religious, created to oil the wheels of the established Church, in all its pomp and frequent inhumanity. Perhaps the most prominent in this category, and certainly the most notorious and gruesome, are the corpse paths, or death roads.

These were routes for funeral processions, particularly in the early medieval countryside, when larger minsters and churches would insist – mainly for reasons of finance and power – on conducting every burial within a huge area. Radiating out from the mother church was a spider’s web of paths used to carry the dead to their final appointment, sometimes the general paths that people used for normal church attendance, but often little used for any other purpose and increasingly imbued with an other-worldly reputation. As the outlying satellite churches grew in size and status, this procedure was gradually abandoned, although it continued into the nineteenth century in some more sparsely populated outposts.

A vast store of legend and superstition hovers around corpse roads. They were where you might see various harbingers of death, such as spectres and wraiths, black dogs, corpse candles and phantom funeral cortèges; numerous accounts survive of such sightings. Less ethereally, one of the most persistent beliefs is that once a coffin has been taken down a path, it automatically becomes a public right of way. Such thinking still surfaces even today in official enquiries held to confirm or extinguish public paths. Public Rights of Way consultant Sue Rumfitt told me of a case she’d attended as a young RoW officer in Bedfordshire in the late 1980s, when a number of elderly witnesses all independently attested to the belief that the path in question was public, because they had heard that ‘a coffin went down it’. Interestingly, none of them had witnessed such an event themselves; the information had been handed down as anecdotal local tradition.

The idea has surfaced since, in RoW enquiries in Norfolk, Suffolk and elsewhere,