since St Patrick spent forty days and forty nights on the mountain, tempted by the deviland then making a series of bargains with God by which the Irish would be granted special dispensations at the Day of Doom.
Doing the climb in bare feet could be seen as a form of repentance for past sins: one woman I met was suffering the tortures of the shoeless climb not because of anything she felt she might have done herself, but for ‘the sins of the dear departed’. It was her dead husband, she explained, whose wickedness needed accounting for. Another man I walked with, Michael John King, a charming, witty, and deeply religious mountain guide from Clifden, further south on the Atlantic coast, said he had taken his shoes and socks off and exposed his feet to the often needle-sharp rocks of the mountain simply as a kind of thanksgiving for the good things which life had brought him, and for being saved from any accidents in the year that had passed. Another man said he was doing it for world peace. Another because a child of his was afflicted with asthma. And yet another saw it, he said, simply as a means of getting in touch with the nature of the mountain and the meaning of the pilgrimage itself.
That, in some ways the most obscure, was the versionthat made most sense to me. Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and writer on the poetics of space, famously wrote: ‘You cannot remember time; you can only remember the places in which time occurs.’ That is the understanding that lies behind all journeys, especially pilgrimage, and particularly a six-hour, increasingly painful pilgrimage up a sharp-edged mountain on the edge of the Atlantic. The pain in the bottom of your feet - ‘God have mercy on your soles’ one man said to me with a toss of the head as he strolled past in his pair of £150 rubber-cushioned mountain boots - and more particularly, perhaps, the ever more delicate care with which you set your feet down on the mountain, picking out the smallest patch of smooth stone in the field of razor-spiked pebbles, is the most effective mnemonic I know. It makes the landscape into a memory machine, so that now, months later in the winter, long after my soles have ceased to burn, I can remember almost literally every step of the way.
But how, you will ask, as I did, can that connect with any aspect of religion? How can pain in the feet have anything to do with a child who has asthma, or a dead husband’s indiscretions, or a relationship toGod? The answer is perhaps largely to do with humility. ‘That is a mountain,’ Ernie Sweeney, one of the great talkers of Castlebar, not far from the foot of the mountain, had told me the day before, ‘which glorifies the humble and humbles the glorified.’ More than that, it attempts to use the landscape as a theatre for the relationship between God and man. Hard pilgrimage recognises that the instinct that drove Christ and Patrick and the thousands of other Irish saints into the wilderness is not a historical phenomenon but a religious metaphor that can be perfectly vital now. The barefooted walk up Croagh Patrick, as I thought of it anyway, is an abandoning of comfort for a while as a means of understanding what the world is like. Exposure to the rocks is exposure to the nature of things, and your own hopelessness in relationship to them. Pain shows you how things are. I told Ernie Sweenie, when I came down the mountain, that the pain made me feel like lying down and dying. ‘Well, if you did,’ he said, ‘you’d go straight to heaven like a rocket. There’d be a hole in the ozone layer to show the way you went.’
7
The Crew
As the summer wore on, and as we made our way north up the Irish coast and then crossed over to the southern Hebrides, something seemed to go wrong between George and me. It was distressing then and it is distressing to write about it now; but whatever went wrong between us is, I think, connected with the nature of a journey like this. The Atlantic
Doing the climb in bare feet could be seen as a form of repentance for past sins: one woman I met was suffering the tortures of the shoeless climb not because of anything she felt she might have done herself, but for ‘the sins of the dear departed’. It was her dead husband, she explained, whose wickedness needed accounting for. Another man I walked with, Michael John King, a charming, witty, and deeply religious mountain guide from Clifden, further south on the Atlantic coast, said he had taken his shoes and socks off and exposed his feet to the often needle-sharp rocks of the mountain simply as a kind of thanksgiving for the good things which life had brought him, and for being saved from any accidents in the year that had passed. Another man said he was doing it for world peace. Another because a child of his was afflicted with asthma. And yet another saw it, he said, simply as a means of getting in touch with the nature of the mountain and the meaning of the pilgrimage itself.
That, in some ways the most obscure, was the versionthat made most sense to me. Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher and writer on the poetics of space, famously wrote: ‘You cannot remember time; you can only remember the places in which time occurs.’ That is the understanding that lies behind all journeys, especially pilgrimage, and particularly a six-hour, increasingly painful pilgrimage up a sharp-edged mountain on the edge of the Atlantic. The pain in the bottom of your feet - ‘God have mercy on your soles’ one man said to me with a toss of the head as he strolled past in his pair of £150 rubber-cushioned mountain boots - and more particularly, perhaps, the ever more delicate care with which you set your feet down on the mountain, picking out the smallest patch of smooth stone in the field of razor-spiked pebbles, is the most effective mnemonic I know. It makes the landscape into a memory machine, so that now, months later in the winter, long after my soles have ceased to burn, I can remember almost literally every step of the way.
But how, you will ask, as I did, can that connect with any aspect of religion? How can pain in the feet have anything to do with a child who has asthma, or a dead husband’s indiscretions, or a relationship toGod? The answer is perhaps largely to do with humility. ‘That is a mountain,’ Ernie Sweeney, one of the great talkers of Castlebar, not far from the foot of the mountain, had told me the day before, ‘which glorifies the humble and humbles the glorified.’ More than that, it attempts to use the landscape as a theatre for the relationship between God and man. Hard pilgrimage recognises that the instinct that drove Christ and Patrick and the thousands of other Irish saints into the wilderness is not a historical phenomenon but a religious metaphor that can be perfectly vital now. The barefooted walk up Croagh Patrick, as I thought of it anyway, is an abandoning of comfort for a while as a means of understanding what the world is like. Exposure to the rocks is exposure to the nature of things, and your own hopelessness in relationship to them. Pain shows you how things are. I told Ernie Sweenie, when I came down the mountain, that the pain made me feel like lying down and dying. ‘Well, if you did,’ he said, ‘you’d go straight to heaven like a rocket. There’d be a hole in the ozone layer to show the way you went.’
7
The Crew
As the summer wore on, and as we made our way north up the Irish coast and then crossed over to the southern Hebrides, something seemed to go wrong between George and me. It was distressing then and it is distressing to write about it now; but whatever went wrong between us is, I think, connected with the nature of a journey like this. The Atlantic
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