The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (23 page)

I’ve always loved the story of Knock Airport, one Monsignor against the world. It worked too: an utterly marginalised economy at the very edge of Europe was given a blood transfusion. In a Westport gift shop, I mentioned to the dotty lady owner that I was flying back home from Knock. ‘Ah, praise be for the airport,’ she wheezed back, as if breathing the Catechism. There have been numerous books about the story, and even a musical. Its inevitable title – though no less brilliant for that – is
On a Wing and a Prayer
. It can surely only be a matter of time until the Hollywood movie, its paddywhackery dial turned up to 11.

My plane swung in low over the squelchy sump of eastern Mayo and banked down on to the top of the hill. From the air, the terminal building looked like Lego, an impression that doesn’t shift much on entering it. Inside the main hall was a perky little blue booth, with a sign on top reading ‘KNOCK SHRINE OFFICE’. A few intriguing posters were displayed, telling punters that while it was all well and good getting excited about the Virgin’s 1879 appearance in the village, they were not to believe any more recent sightings claimed of her at the shrine.

This was a coy reference to the hullabaloo of autumn 2009, when Dublin healer and
soi-disant
mystic Joe Coleman declared publicly that Mary herself had appeared to him and promised that she would be back at Knock on the afternoon of 11 October. Twenty thousand pilgrims came to see. Expectation and excitement built up as Coleman secreted himself in the basilica. He appeared outside, and processed through the crowd holding a huge crucifix. Folk trampled on each other to touch it. And then the sun came out from behind a cloud. People started clapping, and saying that they could see the Virgin in it. Cameras and eyes were pointed straight at the sun. After a minute or so squinting at it, people started to see strange shapes and had the sensation that the sun was spinning around. They shrieked and hollered. It’s a miracle! Or it could have been the warning signs of retinal detachment: cases of solar retinopathy soared in Ireland in the months after. Either way, Coleman announced that Mary had enjoyed herself so much, she’d be back again on 31 October. Only about a quarter of the crowd came back this time, and it wasn’t quite as sunny. It had caused enough of a ruckus though for the Church to put up posters at the airport and distance themselves from Coleman and his visions. The Archbishop of Tuam stuck a tart message on his website: ‘Unfortunately, recent events at the Shrine obscure [our] essential message. They risk misleading God’s people and undermining faith. For this reason such events are to be regretted rather than encouraged.’ It would seem that the Blessed Virgin has an Appear By date on her, except of course when she returns as an image in a tree trunk or a pizza.

This was exactly why I wanted to go and do my pilgrimage in Ireland. A country where some nutter could make thousands of people travel across the country to convince themselves that they had seen the face of God in a cloud is somewhere that takes this stuff deadly seriously. A place where people might sink to their knees, burst into tears, shriek in Latin or tongues and wave their stick at the heavens. You just wouldn’t get that in the C of E. The week before I left, an old episode of
Father Ted
had been on TV. In it, Mrs Doyle is heading off on her Lenten retreat, which includes a pilgrimage up St Patrick’s Hill, a barely disguised Croagh Patrick. Dougal asks Ted what’s so special about the hill, and Ted replies: ‘Ah, it’s a big mountain. You have to take your socks off to go up it, and once you reach the top, they chase you back down again with a big plank. It’s great fun.’ Mrs Doyle is not impressed: ‘Oh, I don’t want it to be any fun at all, Father. I want a good,
miserable
time.’ My sentiments entirely, and I was sorely disappointed that it wasn’t Ryanair operating the route I needed into Knock.

Croagh Patrick took its name from the 40 biblical days and nights that St Patrick spent on its summit in
AD
441. He’d travelled there from Ballintober Abbey, 20 miles further inland, along an ancient track that is believed to have been constructed to ferry druids and pilgrims from the seat of the Kings of Connaught to the holy mountain. The path, called the Tóchar Phádraig, or Patrick’s Causeway, has been re-opened over the past 25 years, though it passes across 63 different pockets of private land and is only freely open on a few days of the year. One of those days was Reek Sunday, and the Abbey was organising a pilgrimage for those who wanted to process to the Reek along this venerable route, before joining the rest of the throng ascending the mountain. I signed up immediately, and booked a B&B for the weekend in Ballintober.

It all fitted: Ballintober Abbey had played a major part in my fondly remembered trip of 20 years ago, for I’d had two startlingly different experiences there just a couple of days apart. The first was with a friend, a very English and very Anglican priest, who had come visiting me in the west from his job as a chaplain in a Cambridge college. We’d landed in Westport, County Mayo’s sweetest honeypot, full of folksy young Europeans twiddling their tin whistles in pubs that jumped with music. This was pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, even pre-Eurovision and Riverdance, but there was definitely a sense that the country was swelling with pride and a new confidence, for both traditionalists and liberals. The previous summer, in the World Cup that saw England tiptoe into the semi-finals before the inevitable penalty ejection by Germany (actually, West Germany: it really has been that long), Ireland, under the sainted tutelage of Jackie Charlton and a crack squad of genealogists, had made it into the quarters. ‘That did it,’ a man over breakfast in a Galway B&B had said to me a year afterwards. ‘That made us think that, finally, we were as good as anyone else.’ The same year had seen the surprise election of liberal lawyer Mary Robinson as President of the Republic. Mayo’s own Mrs Robinson was proving a catalyst for a long-awaited social revolution, and Ireland was on the cusp of becoming the coolest place in Europe.

To my friend, the Reverend, it was still all a bit of a shock. On the train to Westport, his eyes had nearly leapt from their sockets at the sight of people fingering their rosary beads as they quietly murmured Hail Marys – ‘Good God, it’s medieval,’ he whispered to me. A ferociously bright, angular man, he had no soft edges or small talk. Going into a Westport pub, he pushed me in front of him, hissing, ‘You go first – you seem to know how to talk to the indig pop.’ ‘To the
what
?’ I replied. ‘The indig pop – you know, the indigenous population. You talk to them.’ I flew through the door on the end of a bony shove. On the occasions that he did chip in to a pub chat, it was mainly to deliver a dry monologue against the patriarchy of Popery or the fetishising of saints. It didn’t always create quite the mood I was hoping for.

From Westport, we hired bikes and pedalled over to Ballintober. In the churchyard, biblical tableaux had been recently built with an impressive literalness: there is a suburban rockery garden to represent Gethsemane; the house of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, contained a sewing machine and a dresser piled high with tea crockery; an empty cave – with signs that read ‘He Is Not Here’ and ‘He Is Risen’ – demonstrated the Resurrection. The Reverend could barely contain his disdain. ‘It’s all just tasteless mumbo-jumbo,’ he grumbled. When we reached a modern stone cromlech annotated with a sign stating that this represented the Assumption, he exploded. ‘Exactly!’ he hissed. ‘The Assumption! That’s all it is – one big bloody assumption!’

Less than a week later, and with the Rev safely back in his more familiar assumptions of Cambridge liberation theology, I returned to Ballintober, on a coach tour organised as part of the George Moore Summer School. Moore (1852–1933) was a precocious and contrary scion of Mayo Anglo-Irish gentry. He’d escaped his native land at the first opportunity and headed to sample the absinthe and hookers of Paris, while churning out the occasional book of withering memoir and some provocative new realist novels. News reached his incredulous ears that things were stirring back in the old country. A literary revival, spearheaded by the likes of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, was pumping intellectual fibre into the fight for Irish independence. Moore swept imperiously back to Ireland, installed himself in Dublin and hurled himself into the thick of the action. This had been the period that I’d been studying particularly keenly, and I was thrilled to see that my time in Mayo coincided with the summer school.

The coach trip, from the car park at Claremorris train station, was the first event of the weekend. I arrived early and was welcomed like a long-lost friend, none more so than by an unshaven Dublin academic, who lurched on to the bus, spotted me and plumped noisily down by my side. Despite being hung-over from the welcome session the previous night, he spray-gunned me with spittle, trenchant opinions and some libellous asides about our fellow summer-school attendees. After nearly an hour of bouncing around the Mayo lanes, the coach pulled into Ballintober Abbey, a few miles up the road from the burned-out shell of the family’s Moore Hall. The Professor took one look at the glutinous Crucifixion scene at the Abbey’s entrance. ‘Fuck this,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a drink.’ It was 11.05 a.m. The bar opposite the Abbey had just opened, and in no time he’d ordered a Guinness for me and a Smithwick’s and a Jameson’s chaser for himself. I’d not managed half the first Guinness when a second, and before long a third, landed at my side. A bearded head, slightly swimming in and out of focus, peered around the bar door. ‘Ah, there you are, you two,’ it said, and not with any hint of surprise. ‘Coach is off now, come on.’ I downed the third pint almost in one, and prayed that I wouldn’t be sick.

If the Professor had been voluble on the first leg of the trip, now that he was fortified by three pints and three whiskeys, there was no stopping him. He told me of a thwarted love affair with one of his male postgraduate students in Dublin, fixed me with a watery stare and slid his hand over my knee. For the rest of the weekend, he showered me with drinks and books, wrote poetry to me and told me some of the best gossip and the funniest, filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. On his insistence, I stayed with him on my way back through Dublin a few weeks later. On his insistence, I shared his bed. On my insistence, I all but stuck a bolster down the middle and primly rebuffed his hourly advances. Next day, as I prepared to leave for the boat and home, he presented me with a poem that he’d written in those dark, frustrated hours: ‘It is time to prise the lock apart / into the secret garden / which I address / on a sombre and ardent night. / The love-charged baton / crescendoes in eloquent silence’ (I don’t think I could have resisted the ‘garden/hard on’ rhyme myself, so fair play to him). In defence of my cock-teasing, I was 24, as prissy as porcelain and secretly convinced that there would be many other men who would want to write poetry to me. There weren’t, as it turned out.

I’ve long ago lost contact with the Reverend, and the Professor is, I gather from the all-mighty Google, now dead. I thought of them both fondly as I surveyed the stark walls of Ballintober Abbey. The lavish new biblical scenes that had so appalled the Rev had mellowed with age, though not as much as I had. In my 1991 notebook, I’d called Ballintober ‘the Alton Towers of the Catholic faith’, but it all looked rather sweet to me now. In Elizabeth’s House, the crockery-filled cave that had so amused me back then, I read an explanation sheet that detailed the Irish concept of
muintearas
, roughly translated as ‘hospitality’. ‘In the old Gaelic tradition the door was left open and food and drink were left on the table for the passing stranger . . . for often, often, often went the Christ in the stranger’s guise.
Muintearas
signifies welcome, warmth, hospitality and care.’

Two hundred yards up the road in my B&B, I was receiving
muintearas
by the bucket-load. I’d booked months earlier, as soon as I decided to walk the Tóchar Phádraig, but was dimly aware when I got there that there was some degree of surprise at my arrival. They had a family wedding going on, as well as a houseful of Dutch tourists. No matter: I was fixed with a pot of tea, home-made scones and fruit cake, and eventually asked if I’d mind taking their teenage daughter’s bedroom for the weekend. The girl in question was sitting in the kitchen in her pyjamas, texting her mates and telling us what a fierce night the previous evening, the wedding day of her cousin, had been. She gave away her bedroom without a mutter of complaint – ‘Ah sure, I’ll just sleep where I fall this weekend.’ Only the next day did her mum, truly the most capable hostess I’ve ever met, admit that they’d been expecting me the following weekend.

Reek Sunday didn’t so much dawn as become gradually less grey. ‘Ach, it’s sure to clear,’ said my landlady, peering out into the drizzle. I was too excited to care, and wolfed down my breakfast before heading up to the Abbey to join my fellow pilgrims. I was hooking up with Patsy, a friend from Galway, who’d done the Tóchar five Reek Sundays earlier, with around 15 others. Now there were four times as many of us shuffling around the massive nave with our sandwiches and drinks. ‘Amazing what a recession will do for people’s faith,’ whispered Patsy.

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.’