McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (44 page)

‘I signed for the Spice Girls once. Felt like a pop star, so I did.’

Pettigoe is old and new Ireland together, a mixture of unadorned old terraces and bright new guest-houses catering for the pilgrim trade—B& no B, I suppose. On the way out of town to the lough, there’s boggy, reedy land off to the side of the road. Cows are grazing on the few patches of solid ground. And then I round a bend and see it for the first time.

A huge arch bridges the road, spanning two stone gateway pillars. ST PATRICK’S PURGATORY, say the letters, spelled out against the dark, brooding, swirling sky. Across the steely grey water, through the relentless rain, the island and its penitential buildings look like a miniature St Alcatraz.

This really feels like the end of the road. I lock the Tank and walk across to the shore. Somewhere out there, in a hostel dormitory that smells of feet, Tim and Psycho are fitting silencers, and smiling.

On a map of the world drawn in 1492 the only place named in the whole of Ireland, and the country’s most prominent feature, is St Patrick’s Purgatory.

Purgatory is located on Station Island, out in the daunting six-mile expanse of Lough Derg, surrounded by the low, partially wooded, heather-clad mountains of mainland Donegal. It is the only one of seven medieval ‘purgatories’—places of rigorous and extreme pilgrimage—to survive. Although no one can be certain, the earliest Irish writings and traditions insist that St Patrick came here; what is beyond doubt is that the continuity of pilgrimage remains unbroken for at least 1,000 years. All things considered, there is a burden of history here to make the most devout pilgrim feel a spiritual lightweight. Me? I’m intimidated.

The earliest pilgrims to record their experiences were medieval knights and monks from England, France, Spain, Hungary and other parts of mainland Europe. They wrote of spectacular and miraculous visions experienced in the cave in which pilgrims were then confined. It’s easy to see why hallucinations might have been commonplace. In 1353, the cave was recorded as being nine feet long, three feet wide, and high enough for a grown man to kneel, but not stand. The pilgrim was required to carry out a twenty-four-hour waking, praying, non-eating vigil in the cave, having previously existed for fifteen days on bread and water. Medieval texts make no mention of Singapore noodles or Guinness.

From the earliest days until as late as the eighteenth century, the pilgrim, on entering the cave, was laid out as if dead, ready to confront the pains of purgatory and the judgement of the Creator. Although this cheery practice has since been discontinued, and the fifteen-day fast reduced—first, in 1517, to nine days; then, in 1804, to three—the form of prayer and ritual of deprivation to which the present-day pilgrim must submit is the same as it has been for many centuries.

In 1200 Peter of Cornwall, a regular visitor, wrote: ‘Beware. No one leaves Lough Derg without some loss of mind.’

I’ve parked the Tank in a large lakeside car park in which there are already at least 100 vehicles. For a while I’ve been sitting here watching the rain beat down on the steady stream of new arrivals. As I haven’t seen a soul for the last twenty miles, the fact that they’re here at all borders on the miraculous. There are young parents, elderly couples, resolute singles, all carrying a solitary item of no-nonsense luggage. They all seem somehow less daunted than I am. I suppose they’re in spiritual training for it, while I’m hopelessly out of condition. If all the pilgrims coming here today were to line up against the wall for the priests to choose sides, I’d be the fat kid that no one wanted to pick.

Once the rain has eased, and I can’t think of any more reasons for not getting out of the car, I stand in the drizzle by the boot and assemble a modest overnight bag. With a heavy heart the chocolate, the peanuts, and the hip flask of Jameson’s are dumped in the boot, along with other prohibited fripperies, like shoes. I pack my copy of
Father’s Music
, on the remote off-chance that reading isn’t banned, and walk across to the ticket office. Not that I know it’s the ticket office; it’s just the only building I can see.

The only people in front of me in the queue are a couple in their thirties. The man asks the girl on the desk where the current batch of pilgrims are from.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘all over. Dublin, Mayo, Galway. We’ve a lot from Cork.’

‘Are there any from England?’

‘Yes,’ I blurt out from behind him. ‘Me.’

Now why did I do that? Why draw attention to myself, especially when I’m meant to be in pursuit of my Irishness? Perhaps because I’m feeling alien here, so far north, so tightly in the Church’s grip; or at least I will be in a few minutes. He turns round and looks at me, puzzled, but doesn’t say a thing. Anyway, why did he want to know if there was anyone from England? Is he some kind of hit-man working for Tim and Ginger Tash? Whatever his motives, he turns on his heel and walks back out into the weather with his wife. The girl on the desk looks at me.

‘Is it just yourself?’

Oh no. She’s not going to tell me there are no vacancies for singles, is she?

‘That’ll be £20.’

Her accent’s very different from what I’ve become used to: northern Irish, though we’re still in the Republic. She has very kind eyes, which encourage me to seek reassurance.

‘I’m not sure I’m going to be able to take this.’

‘Ah, of course you will. You’ll see. You’ll be like a new man when you get back here. Don’t worry. There’ll be priests over there if you need any advice. Or first aid.’

She makes it sound surreal and amusing, but to me it just feels threatening. As I walk across to the boat waiting at the jetty, my stomach rumbling alarmingly, it occurs to me that, at this precise moment, no one on earth knows where I am. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I were to disappear out there; no one would know where to begin to look.

As the boatman welcomes me with a steely glare, I feel like Edward Woodward as the doomed policeman heading out to the island at the beginning of the classic human sacrifice movie
The Wicker Man
.

Except, of course, that he didn’t know how
The Wicker Man
ended. I do.

20.30 Day One
I never realised there were so many different kinds of feet.

On a beach, which is the only other time you’d see so many of them, there are lots of other bare body parts too, so the feet don’t really stand out. But here, where everything else is covered against the elements with waterproofs and wool, and the feet are just poking out, they really draw attention to themselves, like buttocks peeping out of peekaboo leather cowboy chaps. There are gnarled feet, tiny feet, orang-utans’ feet, webbed feet; they are calloused, varnished, varicosed, tattooed and mucky. A lady praying near me earlier today had strange knobbles sticking out from the balls of her feet, near the big toe. I thought I was ready for anything, but I hadn’t expected feet with antlers.

Seven hours I’ve been out here, and I feel terrible. Dizzy, woozy. I’m already thinking of packing in and leaving early because a) I feel foreign, b) I feel dishonest, and c) there were other reasons, I know there were, but I’m too spaced out to remember them.

The only glimmer of hope has been the discovery that the fast isn’t total. Each day, at a time of your choosing, you’re allowed one meal of black tea or coffee, or hot water, with dry toast or dry oatmeal crackers, to be taken in the canteen. I’ve just had mine. Everyone at my table had been here before. The guy next to me had already done it once this summer, which seems a tad fanatical, even by the standards that prevail here. They know the form. They talk about ‘the beds’—the penitential beds, of which more in a moment—with the easy familiarity of backpackers banging on about beaches in Thailand.

Arriving earlier today felt like coming to a prison, or immigration checkpoint, or refugee camp. As the boat chugged across the ink-black water, the mood was one of silent foreboding, or at least it was for me. A country bachelor from another era sat next to me on the hard wooden bench, clutching one of those small battered brown suitcases people carried in 1930s films. He had a flat cap, gabardine raincoat, a frayed collar, and a face that had seen off worse weather than this. He nodded to me once, as if to acknowledge that we both trod the same earth, and one day we would die. The happy-go-lucky mood was already proving irresistibly infectious.

We landed in front of grey, austere buildings, like Ireland used to be, but isn’t any more. Huddles of barefooted people stood near the jetty, hunched against the grim August climate, smoking and chatting, scanning the new arrivals for friends, relatives, or anyone with a file in a cake. Their cold, wet, grass-soiled feet suggested a depth of devotion and endurance to which I could never aspire; though I suppose there was a chance they were just using their trouser legs to dispose of soil from the escape tunnel.

The new arrivals were then processed through a reception area and given a number. I’m 124D. No one took our names. We also got a slip of paper saying: ‘Another Pilgrim is using this cubicle tonight. You may leave your luggage here. Please do not disturb the bed.’

I went up the stairs to the second floor, reminding myself that I am not a free man, I am a number. There was a dormitory with a couple of dozen bunk beds where sturdy farmers were stowing bags and removing shoes. I was starting to feel overwhelmed, a small boy on my first day at big school. The metal-framed beds and spartan religious atmosphere were straight out of early James Joyce, before he started making words up and you had to try and guess what he was on about. I found the bed that will be mine tomorrow, but is someone else’s tonight. Seamus, who will be in the bunk above me once he’s inherited it from the current incumbent, introduced himself. He’d just driven from Dublin with a hangover. Hope he didn’t drink anything after midnight, or I’ll have to dob him in to the Fathers. I took my shoes and socks off, put a hat and coat on, and went out to get started.

Here’s what we have to do.

As well as the sleepless vigil and the fasting, each pilgrim must make the stations, a station being a daunting list of prescribed prayers. Though some are made communally, at night, in the basilica, the bulk of them are to be executed alone, in silence, as you walk the penitential Beds.

The Beds are the rugged stone foundations and ruins of ancient monastic cells, around, over, and among which one must trample. There are a worrying number of them. There’s St Patrick’s Bed, and St Brendan’s Bed, and St Brigid’s, St Katherine’s and St Columba’s Beds. Sts Davog and Malaise, though, have just the one Bed between two. At each Bed you walk round the outside three times, kneel at the entrance, walk three times round the inside, then kneel at the cross in the centre, all the while saying to yourself the set number of Our Fathers and so on. As if this wasn’t enough, you also walk four times round the outside of the basilica, kneeling at various points, embracing various crosses, and also stand, pray, kneel, pray, and pray on the rocks at the water’s edge. All barefoot, mind.

And when you’ve done all that, you’ve done one station.

While you’re here, you have to do nine.

A quick calculation suggests that the conscientious pilgrim will rack up a minimum of 2,421 prayers. I’ll double-check this figure later, if conscious. Potential cartilage damage, of course, is incalculable.

Walking along the pathway towards the first bed the slap of bare sole on wet concrete was refreshing, though I could see how it might grate after a while. Suddenly two priests walked past me, all in black, smiling.

And wearing shoes.

So we’re not in this together, then. They’re in charge, and we’re in pain. I wonder if they sidle up and give you a sly stamp on the toes if you’re not performing up to scratch. Thank God we didn’t have to go barefoot at school. There would have been carnage. Teachers would have queued to jump from the tops of cupboards in steelheeled clogs, crushing our little pink toes like jelly babies. Speaking of feet, I remember one freezing and rainy February day being told the weather was too bad for rugby. A sigh of relief went round the changing-room. ‘Get changed for a four-mile cross-country run instead,’ said the Brother in charge. So Mike O’Neill presented him with a letter from his father, a doctor, saying he had a septic foot.