The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (22 page)

Thank God, too, that the broken stiles, the rights of way that don’t translate from the map to the ground and the occasional theatrically surly farmer all combine to put off a certain type of English walker. Sorry, but it has to be said. Were it not for the distinctive Welsh way, in all its bony bloody-mindedness, the beautiful mid-western peninsula of the island of Britain would long ago have been overwhelmed from the east, even more than it already has been. And even nice people, people like us who read the liberal press and recycle every last bit of it, who love the wind on our face and a pint of real ale in our hands, even we can cause untold damage to the fragile fabric of marginalised communities by insisting on our way over theirs. We might not even realise that we are insisting, but we will be.

I’ve just had a fortnight with the boot on the other foot, and it’s been very instructive. There’s a tiny cottage that I rent occasionally at the very end of the Llŷn peninsula, that bony arm of north-west Wales pointing at Ireland. In common with the many other little whitewashed stone dwellings dotted around the heathery slopes, the cottage is a
tŷ-unnos
, a ‘one-night house’. This refers to an old Welsh tradition that if you started to build a house on common land at sundown and managed to have it roofed and with smoke coming out of its chimney by the following dawn, that house, and the land as far as an axe-throw in four directions, was yours. The little
tŷ-unnos
that I rent sits above the sea on the side of a mountain criss-crossed by paths both official and not. There’s no garden as such, just a couple of out-houses (one of which contains the toilet bucket; there’s no bathroom, nor indeed running water – you have to collect that from the spring up the hill) so that the house sits squarely as part of the hillside, with no evident boundary.

Since my last visit two years ago, the Llŷn coast path has been cut through on top of the cliffs either side of the cottage, and I saw more people walking up there this time than ever before, I’d guess by a factor of about ten. If I was sitting outside with my nosy sheepdog, who has a tendency to stand and stare at anything that moves, however far away, then the pattern of behaviour that unfolded when people came past was almost invariably the same every time. I saw them crest the hill that first gave them a view of the cottage and us. They would stop, look a little befuddled, pull into a tight huddle and confer with each other. The walk leader would then very ostentatiously pull out the map, and do a bit of pointing, reassured that they were in the right place, on the official right of way. Visibly bolstered by the knowledge, they would then sail past, heads high and bristly chins resolute, not quite near enough to say hello, but never, ever, with so much as a wave or a small detour for a chat.

It reminded me of a passage in a wonderful old book I picked up years ago in the back of some dusty second-hand shop.
The Countryside and How to Enjoy It
was published at the end of the 1940s: it is a splendidly paternalistic instruction manual intended to smooth the way of the great unwashed into their brand new National Parks and designated trails. Amongst chapters entitled ‘Going on a Journey’ and ‘What of the Weather?’, there is one called ‘The Footpath Way’, written by S. P. B. (Petre) Mais, perhaps the author most responsible for educating Britons in the 1930s and 1940s about their landscape and history. ‘Never turn aside from an approaching farmer,’ he boomed. ‘You would consider it a grave discourtesy if you found a caller at your own house turning away when you came out to meet him. The farmer is your host wherever you go in the country and it is necessary to exercise the manners of a guest when you encounter him.’ Mind you, he also offers this gem: ‘It is quite likely that you may want to call on the farmer either to ask the way or to beg a glass of milk or perhaps a meal. The farmer may be glad to see you in spite of being a very busy man.’ Just a hello would have done; I wasn’t after rustling up dinner for them.

So inspiring was the experience of being dropped off three days away from home, and then just walking back, taking in familiar sights from wholly new angles, I rang my dad to see if he fancied doing exactly the same across our home county of Worcestershire. We did it the next week, my step-mum dropping us off in the Wyche Gap, that ancient pass through the Malvern Hills that marks the border with Herefordshire: a sublime experience that I’ll cover at a later point.

If there is one path that I would encourage anyone to try, it’s this, and every one is bespoke and unique. Beg a lift, take the train or bus, and land two or three days’ walk away from home. Turn back, and start walking. Stay in a B&B only ten miles from your front door. See your own back yard in a completely new context. It’s the ultimate staycation – and a great way of realising too that for a good walk, you really don’t need too much Stuff.

Stairway to heaven: ascending Croagh Patrick, County Mayo, Ireland

With the exception of the Coast to Coast, which had been a glimpse into one hall of my own particular hell, every path I’d walked so far had put me in a far more spiritually robust frame of mind. I was keen now to try some paths with an explicitly divine identity, in particular to undertake an organised pilgrimage. With that as the aim, you want to go for the jugular. Although I am normally quite a loner when it comes to walking, when I thought about undertaking a proper pilgrimage route, one of the most important factors to my mind was the presence of others, and preferably in cacophonous multitude. A few years ago, in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a Basque bulwark of a town on the French side of the Pyrenees, I’d been genuinely moved and amazed at the sight of the legion of pilgrims starting their journey there on the Camino of St James to Santiago de Compostela, nearly 500 miles away on the Atlantic coast of Galicia. They looked so purposeful, excited and united in their mission, and that’s what I wanted next. Despite – or perhaps because of – our technological advancement, we seem to need pilgrimage more than ever. 2,491 people completed the Camino in 1985. By 1995, this had jumped to 19,821, and it now easily tops 100,000 a year.

I considered the options nearer home. What about the original great pilgrimage route, as portrayed by Geoffrey Chaucer over seven centuries ago in
The Canterbury Tales
? His motley band of pilgrims, covering all bases from the devout to the debased, caroused their way across Kent from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to St Thomas à Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Although the express intention of the trip was meek obeisance to the Christian principles of confession and redemption, it was all conducted with feet firmly scuffed into the earth, the sacred and the profane inseparably commingled. That seems to be an essential ingredient in a good pilgrimage: devotion and wonder, for sure, but with the option of a little light drunkenness and debauchery too.

Aside from the fact that it might bring back unpleasant flash-backs from my A levels, I quickly dismissed the idea of following Chaucer. His pilgrims’ most likely route from Southwark to Canterbury was along the Roman Watling Street. This is now the A2 and assorted other trunk roads of varying ferocity, and I wasn’t much struck on the idea of plodding through Dartford, Gravesend and the sprawl of Medway towns while ingesting the fumes of countless Polish and Latvian lorries. I pondered a pilgrimage route to England’s most famous Catholic shrine, Walsingham in Norfolk. A few folk walk there from Ely Cathedral, a 73-mile tramp under the vast skies of the Fens. The route appealed hugely, not least for its lack of contours, but then I remembered going to Walsingham a few years ago and being quite repulsed by its sickly piety. I looked too at the groups doing the Ely–Walsingham pilgrimage, and that didn’t help. Salty Chaucerian exuberance was what I was after, rather than a polite trundle across the flatlands in the company of people who’d not taken their sandals off since 1986.

The Celtic corners of our islands seemed to offer a better chance of faith
and
fun. One of the great realisations about Wales, after ten years of living there, was how Christianity had cannily absorbed and adopted the older ways. Rugged little stone churches, seemingly sprung from the rock on which they sat, had often been built on sites that had already accrued a spiritual significance over centuries, perhaps millennia, before the missionaries arrived. As it is in the buildings, so it seemed in the doctrine: a far greater sense of organic absorption. My local parish priest, a man of belligerent vision and effervescent charisma, wrote a book on the many manifestations of the Goddess in our culture, and has built a little chapel adjoining his house that bursts with gilted icons and incense, a fusion of Eastern Orthodoxy, Hinduism and Christ in a damp Welsh meadow. I’d found comparable fusions in the Pictish kingdom of north-east Scotland, in the bypassed bits of Cornwall and, once you peeled back and peered under the festering fundamentalism, throughout Ireland.

Ireland! That was it. If there was one place in these islands where I might find the Christ and the
craic
, it was the Emerald Isle, where the church and the pub remain as one. Once that realisation had come, the answer to my quest became obvious. Much as I share the scepticism towards what Jim Perrin calls the ‘capitalist construct’ of our obsession with ‘conquering’ the highest, the largest or the longest, when it came to a proper pilgrimage, size really was everything. I needed the biggest, most tumultuous there was, and that could only mean Reek Sunday up Croagh Patrick.

There are lots of ingredients that make up the perfect holy mountain, but the single biggest is its shape. A sacred mount must draw the eye and hold it there, in awe, in aesthetic delight and in slight terror too. It must embody both beauty and a certain haughtiness, which is why so many great holy mountains sit at some distance from any other sizeable peaks, for they are scene-stealers and do not like to share the stage. Symmetry is good, even if seen only from one or two vantage points. These too will acquire subsidiary holy status and become outlying pin-pricks of the light that generation after generation of worshipper has accorded the peak itself. Looking from the mountain from other angles, it is often best if it appears in many different shapes and guises, a reminder of the shape-shifting truths at the heart of any faith system. Travel the full circle around a holy mountain and it should, in turn, appear forbidding and welcoming, impenetrable and comely, and all the time iridescently beautiful.

Croagh Patrick, or the Reek as it’s known locally, succeeds on all fronts. A 2,510ft (765m) cone of quartz, it rears out of the landscape at the bottom of the island-spattered Clew Bay on the wild coast of County Mayo. The rounded shoulders of the Connemara mountains sit at a discreet distance, leaving Croagh Patrick to wallow in its own glory, commanding land, sea and air – not that you can always tell which is which. The boundaries between them fuzz in the ever-changing light, as sea mists roll in, clouds billow over, sunlight bursts through in day-glo shafts and rainbows shimmer briefly into life. No-one can resist the holy pull of the Reek. To climb it is as much a part of the Irish identity as is doing the Hajj to Mecca for a Muslim. Especially on Reek Sunday, the final weekend of July, a date that harks back to the ancient Celtic harvest festival of Lughnasa, when anything between twenty and thirty thousand people sweat and grind their way up its unyielding slopes. And although the Reek’s origins as a place of pilgrimage far pre-date Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church has done everything in its power to appropriate the mountain as one of its own. There might be many a pagan overtone, but the journey would be played out against the backdrop of muscular Papism, in all its shredded splendour.

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 hall. Somehow, the story stuck to Tooreen: one theory is that this was thanks to some concerted smearing by a rival dance promoter eager to squash the success of Fr Horan’s new hall. This rival was none other than Albert Reynolds, future Taioseach. True or not, it didn’t kill Horan’s hall: quite the opposite. Now infamous for its diabolic visitation, Tooreen became one of the busiest dancehalls in the land, the acrid tang of rising rural hormones the perfect olfactory complement to the satanic sulphur.

In 1963, Horan became the curate – and shortly afterwards, the parish priest – at nearby Knock, transforming the rundown village into a shrine of global renown. In August 1879, the Virgin Mary, together with St John and St Joseph, had manifested in an apparition to a group of villagers on the gable end of their dowdy parish church. Knock had been a fairly low-level shrine ever since, but Horan was determined to elevate it to the Catholic Premier League, a name synonymous with Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje (incidentally, all destinations served by Knock Airport, alongside more secular shrines such as Gran Canaria and Alicante). A vast shed of a new church, dedicated to Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, and able to hold a congregation of 10,000, was built and consecrated in 1976. In a PR masterstroke, Horan succeeded in securing a visit to celebrate the centenary of the 1879 apparition by the charismatic new Polish Pope, John Paul II. The Monsignor expertly capitalised on the publicity, using it to add some considerable traction to the idea of a holy airport for Knock.

Buoyed by the post-Pope euphoria, the government swung in behind the Monsignor. The Minister of Transport, Horan’s old sparring partner Albert Reynolds, performed a sod-cutting ceremony on 2 May 1981 – the lump of stringy turf he pulled out, and the spade with which he dug it, are preserved with all of the solemnity normally accorded to a saint’s relics in the airport’s arrivals hall (arrivals corridor, if we’re being picky). An election soon followed, which resulted in a change of government and a change of heart regarding the airport; true to good Catholic teaching, the new government pulled out at the last minute.

The people of Knock were not to be ignored, however. Rallied by the man in a dog collar and hard hat, they poured on to the unpromising peaty peak of Barr na Cùige, levelled the ground and began to lay the runway themselves. On 25 October 1985, two jets took off in the only direction they knew, from Knock to Rome. More flights followed; not many, but enough to quieten the worst of the scoffers. On 30 May of the following year, 20,000 cheering Mayomen attended the airport’s official opening by the swaggeringly bent three-times Taioseach Charlie Haughey, who loved to play up his humble Mayo origins. Just two months later, Monsignor Horan died suddenly on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Not a great advert for the healing powers of Lourdes, but a terrific boost for his immaculately conceived airport, and it has gone from modest strength to strength ever since.