Articles > Medieval Pilgrimage, Modern Ireland

"You can think of Station Island as a holy Alcatraz," I�d been told. And so it seemed as the boat chugged across Donegal's Lough Derg, through a zinc-grey mist, to the island site of Saint Patrick's Purgatory. The high walls of the island's self-contained world - the four-storey dormitory wings, an abandoned 19th century hospice, the laundries, water purification plant, and the octagonal, cone-capped basilica - fell sheer to the edge of the small rocky outcrop's shores. It was as if a street or two of gloomy real estate had been gouged from some dark city and set adrift to float between the waters and the sky. A forbidding limbo, pierced only by the dark, tunneled gateway, leading to the island�s interior from the landing stage.

All of us disembarking from the boat were pilgrims; 'strangers' in the true sense of the word's Latin root. We had each paid our pilgrims fee of eighteen Irish punts, entitling us to three days in Purgatory; including the boat ride back and forth, one meal a day of dry toast and black tea or coffee, and, of the two nights we'd spend on the island, a mere one night's sleep in a dormitory bunk.

There were 203 of us starting the pilgrimage that afternoon; one day's intake amongst the 15,000 or so who visit the island each year in the mid-June to mid-August season. Following the strict programme of the pilgrimage - "the most arduous in Catholic Europe" as I heard again and again - we had fasted since the previous midnight, and now, as we touched the shores of the island, we took off our shoes. Over the coming days and nights we would walk barefoot at all times. We were here to be 'opened up' through a 'mantra type' prayer cycle, through walking (even in so restricted an area, it was our constant perambulations that gave us our status as genuine pilgrims), and through, to put it bluntly, plain discomfort.

Monsignor Mohan, the Prior of Saint Patrick's Purgatory, summed up the island's past. "There's a thousand years of recorded history here, and probably five hundred years or more of the pilgrimage tradition before that." We were watching men and women starting on the first of the nine 'stations.' To complete each one would take an hour or more of stub-toed stumbling over rocks and across gravel in a clockwise migration of circling and kneeling and praying.

The idea of a pilgrimage to Purgatory was taken literally in former times; growing numbers of early pilgrims endured up to 30 days fasting on bread and water before finally being sealed in a small cave for 24 hours. So popular was this pilgrimage that, on a 1492 map of the world, the outline of Ireland, in the far west, is empty of all identifying marks save for the labeling of Saint Patrick's Purgatory.

Even if Saint Patrick himself never visited the island, (there is evidence that he saw the lake from afar, but only myth and believe to substantiate closer contact), the Purgatory's traditions embody the Saint's penchant for doing spiritual battle with the Devil in physically arduous locations. The very harshness of Saint Patrick�s Purgatory was the attraction in Medieval times, and it was only in 1804 that the pilgrimage transmuted into the slightly gentler three-day synthesis of prayer, fasting, walking and sleeplessness that is still followed today.

As Monsignor Mohan and I talked, we looked over the 7 'lecti poenosi' � penitential 'beds' - the horseshoe-shaped foundations of 9th century beehive cells. A large sycamore sheltered a few of them from the cold rain of a Donegal August. That tree, a small sward of grass, and the mud and rocks had become an intense reduction of the natural world within the grey box of the island's buildings.

"Everybody comes here for their own reason," the Monsignor paused to greet a passing woman as an old friend, "Some come here every year, some at times of great personal turmoil, some are lapsed and want to find something in Catholicism again. Many come on someone else's behalf - perhaps they're not believers but they come for a sick parent or to fulfill a promise."

All for our own reasons. I began to walk. Others moved around me in the rain. There was the murmur of prayer. I had read; 'To go through with pilgrimage at all is to do it well,' and the simplicity of the task before me became a meditation. Still, an awful monotony ebbed and flowed like a tide through the endless pacing and kneeling. I noticed small things; arthritic hands counting rosary beads; that nearly every woman whatever her age had painted toenails; how the raindrops glowed golden on the bronze crucifixes. The continuous walking and praying and kneeling.

Much later, before the start of that night's vigil, we ate the dry toast and black tea of the day's single meal. A Dubliner, sitting nearby and on his 20th pilgrimage, offered advice to anybody listening; "Twenty four hours to the next bit of toast, lads - get as much into your tummies as possible and it'll sustain you through the night." Outside the dining hall, a trio of girls from Derry, and an Italian noviate priest were puffing on cigarettes, (the only consumables sold on the island), and bemoaning their bruised knees. "You pray through your knees." "God, yes. You really feel things here - the mud oozing between your toes; it's like you're wearing sackcloth and back in medieval times." Except the pilgrims were wearing anoraks and cagoules. From one angle they look like hill walkers. From another angle, like monks cowled and hooded.

The 'knee thing' was to get worse. Once in the basilica the doors were symbolically bolted behind us; in the low light we started the all-night vigil. An organ chorded softly and a solo voice sang, 'Stay with me, and watch with me, watch and pray,' over and over, and one by one 200 voices joined in. The sound rose and fell like the soughing of a calmed sea. It was the moment on which, for me, the pilgrimage turned - a sense of togetherness with strangers, which I leant on through the long night ahead.

"What arises tonight, you can't escape. For the next 24 hours there is neither food nor sleep to protect you...there is nothing to hide behind." The priest's tones held an expectancy of 'things' arising from deep within us. We began to walk around the nave, paced by the metronome of prayer read from the lecturn. They were dark hours, wracked by the desire to sleep, and pierced by the pain of kneeling over and over on command to pray.

Between the stations we were driven out of the basilica and into the wet, blustery dark; "Go on...take a turn in the rain...clear your heads." And invariably we ended up crowded into the 'shelter,' a long hall built over the lake waters or within the dripping ruins of the abandoned hospice. Experienced pilgrims acted like old lags doing another stretch in jail - cradling cigarettes in cupped hands, bodies cocooned in layers of foul-weather gear, slotting themselves into snug corners out of the draughts and cold. Sharing their survival skills.

"Come here to us." I was summoned by a trio of formidable women from Clare, who slipped easily between English and Irish. "Did you try the 'Lough Derg soup?' Uisce te le piobar agus salann - hot water with a bit of pepper and salt. It'll keep you going." They wiggled their bare toes. "You'd never get sick here...even with the cold, wet feet on you - nobody ever got sick here." They scattered pepper over cups of warmed water and added a pinch of salt. �Here, go on, try it now.� The �soup� tasted awful but drank it anyway, to sustain me through more hours of kneeling and praying as the bell summoned us back into the basilica.

Dawn came more through an absence of darkness than much of an increase in visible light. With the night's 'stations' finished, the damp, grey day stretched before us with little to fill it. I ached to sleep, and dreaded the hours to kill when we must stay awake. �If you see somebody nodding off, give them a little poke,� we�d been told, �you�ll have to help each other, look out for each other because the day is difficult and it�s easy to slip into sleep.� The coming hours looked bleak.

And then I found a medieval salvation. Almost alone in the emptied basilica, propped in a pew, the luminous detail of the Harry C Clarke stained glass windows depicting the Twelve Apostles suddenly caught my eye and then engrossed me as completely as if I was watching a film stopped in time by some trick of relativity. If the pilgrimage had given me anything that I could carry from the island, it was a memory of this sudden and effortless coming of quietude; not much perhaps compared to other�s faith, but an answered prayer enough, perhaps, in the accelerating pace of modern life.

That day passed, as did the night of sleep that followed. The dormitories quietened as pilgrims fell into deep chasms of sleep and, far too suddenly, came to life again at dawn. There was an atmosphere of refreshed joy amongst us as we filed into our last mass on the island. "I didn't sleep like that since I was a child," marveled one elderly woman, "ah God, no, and now I feel like a child again�just like new." �You�re right, isn�t it better than any health farm?� a broad Dublin accent stated. �And cheaper, too,� somebody else muttered.

I recalled that of all the people that I had met on the island, few had talked of troubles or their deeper reasons for making the pilgrimage. Encouragement and jokes had prevailed amongst us, leaving silence, lone contemplation and prayer as the medium to exorcise darker, more individual thoughts. Because every pilgrim on the island was there for some strong reason; a surprisingly large number were school leavers hoping to influence the results of their final exams through divine intervention, some visitors were unsure of their faith and putting it to the test, other people had sick relatives or recently died loved ones and so loss or even guilt to assuage.

A majority were middle aged or beyond, country people who came to Lough Derg annually as a spiritual holiday and, maybe subconsciously, to find and keep alive an Ireland of older values. The latter group seemed to see the pilgrimage almost in terms of a communal labour. For them the pilgrimage was, perhaps, like bringing in a harvest, a celebration of a time when there was hardship and weariness but also good humour, shared work and the closeness to nature that had become harder to find in a rapidly changing modern nation.

We made our last station in the early morning and then gathered at the jetty to take the boat. The island pilgrimage had passed. The rain was still falling as the boat was cast off, and voices spontaneously rose in song, verses honouring Saint Patrick. The girls from Derry tapped my shoulder, "If you look back as you leave the island, you'll come back again, so you will." I looked back at the 'Holy Alcatraz.' The pilgrimage had been a strange experience - people had actually talked little of their faith, of their troubles, of the reasons that had pushed them through this medieval ordeal. But the pilgrims' actions had spoken of charity and deep belief. A disembodied observation from Patrick Kavanagh's poem 'Lough Derg' entered my mind: '...Christendom's purge. Heretical around the edges: the centre's hard...' We bumped against the mainland.

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