A short video of pilgrims at the top of Croagh Patrick at daybreak on Reek Sunday, when thousands of people risk hypothermia and exposure by having the temerity to go hiking in Ireland in the middle of summer.
Five years ago, I had a great idea. Ok, it was more like a great idea in theory, since it turned out to be a very stupid one in practice. Reek Sunday is a great tradition in Co. Mayo, and I wanted to take pictures of the great line of pilgrims making their way up to the summit of Croagh Patrick, from before dawn until late in the day. To do that, I persuaded my wife to climb the hill with me late on the evening before and pitch a tent near the summit. Since people climb the mountain all through the night, I had also hoped to take pictures of the stream of light from climbers’ torches and framed perhaps under a sky of stars. Clearly, that level of naive optimism deserved a smack of divine punishment, and verily, He did his best to smite me.
The cloud rolled in about ten minutes after we reached the summit, and we pitched the tent in a gale – a very wet gale. So no night pictures, and not much fun shivering in the tent as the unending bands of rain swept in off the Atlantic and washed over us. The weather didn’t ease at sunrise. I took the video above at around five in the morning, where a fine collection of very wet climbers were already at the summit and probably questioning their sanity. I know I was.
The pilgrimage was cancelled this year due to bad weather – the glass porch (visible at the very end of the video above) used to shelter the bishop while he says Mass at the summit church was blown away by an overnight gale. Since it isn’t possible to actually ban people from the mountain, naturally hundreds of people climbed it anyway. A few people were treated for hypothermia and there was criticism of them for ignoring the warnings. You know it was a slow-news week when even the Joe Duffy show (a phone-in radio show on RTE Radio 1 where the default setting is OUTRAGE AT SOMETHING!!!) wondered why people ignored the warnings. Short answer – we’re Irish – we’ve never met a warning sign that we didn’t want to hurdle over on the way to impending doom. After all, that’s the purpose of a pilgrimage – it is supposed to be hardship. People get treated for hypothermia most years on Reek Sunday (apart from the odd year when the clouds part, and then people get treated for sunstroke instead). The smiting never stops.