Croagh Padraig.

I climbed a mountain. Were my family not reading this, there would be a pleasant pile of proud blasphemies located between the words "a" and "mountain". Croagh Padraig (I'd chosen to pronounce it Crow Patrick from the start and was quite pleased to find that I was actually correct.) is the tallest mountain in the Westport area, and is a holy mountain and traditional pilgrimage site.

My first accomplishment, before I ever climbed it, was finding it. Following that, the mountain was both more and less difficult to gain than I'd expected. Or, rather, it was actually a good deal more difficult than I'd thought it would be, but I was far more capable of it than I would have guessed. The terrain was made up of loose rocks, the size, perhaps, of my five-year-old niece's balled fist, and larger fixed stones that required a bit of labouring to surmount. I began my climb at two, and despite the hard work was continuously amazed at how much ground I was able to cover in relatively short periods of time. The pictures I took of the view, the surrounding mountains, the towns and fields below, the sea beyond that, exist to document my relative position as I made the climb as much as because the view was, in fact, as devastatingly beautiful as one could ever ask this magnificent country to be. As I just mentioned to my mother in an email, this week I've found some of the most spectacular landscapes I've ever seen in my life, and nearly every time I'm a bit humbled to find that sheep and cattle live out their lives in such places. I've asked a few of the rams about it, and they assure me that they are in fact sufficiently grateful.

Croagh Padraig has two stories of which I know. In the one that involves the saint of the same name, Patrick, in a story that sounds an awful lot like Christ in the desert, spent forty days and forty nights fasting on the mountain. In this version not the devil himself but the devil's mother assaulted Patrick, doing so in the form of a bird and in the form of a snake. Victorious, Patrick banished the serpents but, feeling generous, apparently allowed the birds to stay. From the peak he then surveyed the land that he had won for Christianity. The mountain was holy long before that, though. Originally it had been associated with Crom Dubh, the old god whose one burning eye had once brought fertility but now scorched the fields, and with Lugh, the swaggering upstart deity who came to challenge him. Crom Dubh was king at the time and was of the race of the nature gods, and the ancient people of this island, like anyone who has to spend any amount of time in it, understood that nature is as terrifying as it is nourishing. Lugh came to fight in the name of the gods of culture. Many of the myths circle this theme: worshipping the land and the mind both, realising that the natural world doesn't actually care whether or not you have anything to eat, giving due respect while being ready to work and fight for what you need. The sun was king until it burnt too hot, then we prayed for rain. Lugh, besides being the god of being good at nearly everything, is a god of lightning, and of storms. Fittingly, I got a bit of a sunburn on my climb.

Although pilgrims make the climb nearly every day of the year, Christians do so on the last Sunday of July, whereas the pagans would have done so on the last Friday. Both occur a few days before Lughnasadh, one of the quarterly festivals, the one that marks Lugh's victory. That's today, as it happens. I like that Crom Dubh gets a holiday of his own before he's torn down. Climb to the top of the mountain. Kiss the sun goodbye before you try to kill it. I missed both traditional dates, although not by much. Irish buses, as I've mentioned, are exercises in piety. They nearly stop running on Sundays, so I did as best I could and got to the mountain on Monday, instead. I'm glad of it, too. According to the taxi driver who got me from Westport, the last town to which I could get a bus, to Murrisk, the town at the foot of the mountain, more pilgrims arrived this year than any he could remember. They usually expect twenty-thousand people. He guessed he saw thirty to forty-thousand.

Oh, yes. One traditionally made the climb barefoot. Only one person I saw did, and I needn't mention that I adore my shoes and wouldn't have taken them off even if my doing so would have meant the conversion of Ireland to some interesting new creed of my devising.

I suppose I should admit that I didn't quite make it to the top. I'll remind anyone who asks, however, that my endurance is not to blame. Unfortunately, there was only one series of buses to get me near the place, and only one set to get me to the place at which I was sleeping, and the time between them was not adequate to make it all the way. Pity. I got quite close, though, as near as the first of the three ancient cairns that mark stations near the peak. They're ancient burial sites marked with piles of stones, and the devout walk around them in multiples of seven and three saying Our Fathers and Hail Mary's and Creeds.

So. Take your pick. Mark your prayers on stones and beads. Fight or dance with snakes and birds. Conquer and marry the earth and the sky. Kiss the sun. Bring the rain.