Compared with the Camino de Santiago or the other great pilgrim routes of Europe, the one to Mám Éan in Connemara is a miniature affair.
You can do it from two directions and, even combined, they’re only a few kilometres long.
But the history of the pilgrimage is no less epic than Santiago’s, reaching back to pagan times when it was associated with the harvest festival of Lughnasa.
Its Christian period dates from the visit in 442 AD of St Patrick, who blessed Connemara (or in some versions the whole southern half of Ireland, which he seems to have otherwise avoided) from the lofty perch of Mám Éan mountain.
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In the process he was attacked by locals, who threw stones. The devil inevitably turned up too, until the holy man drowned him in the adjacent lake.
The scenery is on a grand scale too. From a car park at the southern end, where I started my walk, the Inagh Valley falls away to your left, with several of the Twelve Bens looming like giant, grey-green haystacks: a familiar sight even to some first-time visitors, thanks to the paintings of Paul Henry.
A narrow, rocky, path meanders up the mountain ahead, lightly marked but accompanied at first by reassuring signs detailing the pilgrim route and “geotrail” through this ancient landscape, which outside days of designated pilgrimage is populated mainly by sheep, spray-painted in psychedelic colours.
A twenty-minute climb brings you to Mám Éan, the “passage of the birds”, now overlooked by a gaunt statute of St Patrick and a tiny modern chapel, along with the more ancient landmarks including wells and Leaba Phádraig - a small cave where the holy man supposedly slept.
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A little beyond that, over a ridge, lies the great expanse of Maam Valley, where the northern approach to the Mám Éan begins and ends, at Keane’s pub in Maum.
This pass was a traditional boundary between southern and northern Connemara, and so between the land of the O’Flaherty’s and Joyce Country. It explains some of the tensions that used to surround the annual “pattern” at Mám Éan’s holy well and why the Catholic Church came to suppress the pilgrimage in the early 20th century, before approving revival in the late 1970s.
The Scottish travel writer Henry Inglis (1775 – 1835) visited Maam during his 1834 tour of Ireland, subsequently described in a two-volume book. He was lucky that his trip to Connemara coincided with a “pattern” day at Mám Éan. And he was doubly lucky, having shamefacedly admitted wanting to see a faction fight while in Ireland, that the event supplied one of those two.
As Inglis told it, Mám Éan was at the centre of a kind of branding dispute then, with the Joyces claiming this was their country and the O’Flahertys begging to disagree.
Of the former, by the way, the travel writer was in awe. “The Joyces are a magnificent race of men,” he wrote, “the biggest, and stoutest, and tallest, I have seen in Ireland, eclipsing even the peasantry of the Tyrol ...”
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But the pattern began pleasantly, with Inglis welcomed into some of the 20 or more tents pitched at the site, some of them serving as bars, and the locals speaking English for his benefit. Then something uttered by one of the Joyces appeared to cause offence, at which point the mood darkened and the language “suddenly changed to Irish”.
Men were now seen to gulp down glasses of poitín as a prelude to action. Warned by a bar tender that there would be fighting soon, Inglis excused himself from the company and “took up a safe position on some neighbouring rocks”.
Although the fighting included shillelaghs and rock-throwing, it left fewer casualties than Inglis had feared. “Five or six were disabled but there were no homicides,” he reported. It was no surprise to him that the Joyces won on points. But he was taken aback by the good humour, as even some enemies “shook hands and kissed [afterwards] and appeared as friendly as before”.
Poitín drinking and other excesses, combined with a lingering paganism, made the church uneasy and eventually intolerant of the patterns. But the summer event, formerly held on the last Sunday of July, also suffered from the rivalry of a more famous western pilgrimage: Croagh Patrick.
Thus, except for the local faithful, it fell into neglect for much the 20th century. Then it was rescued by one of those faithful, the reforming Jesuit priest Fr Micheál MacGréil.
Born in Laois but of Joyce Country stock and reared in Mayo, Fr MacGréil was a man of many causes. He championed the rights of homosexuals in the church and once, in the late 1960s, spent time living in disguise on the roadsides of Ireland to better understand the plight of travellers. But the Mám Éan shrine was especially dear to him and he was determined to revive its former glories.
In the late 1970s, he won permission from superiors to celebrate mass again among the stones up there, after which (as he told travel writer Christopher Somerville), “people pushed a whole lot of money over the rock at me – I didn’t want it but they insisted”.
So he used the money to have an altar erected at the site. The statue, stations of the cross, and chapel soon followed, built or paid for by locals. From then on, as long as he could, Mac Gréil vowed to say mass at the shrine once a year, with the date now moved to the first Sunday in August.
None of this was designed to obliterate the older pagan history of the site. “I wanted to put a strong Christian message on the place,” the priest explained to Somerville, “without interfering with all the pre-Christian wells and stones and the other sacred sites there”.
Having successfully revived the shrine and pilgrimage, Fr MacGréil was anxious that they would not turn into mere tourist attractions. In this, Connemara gave him two reliable allies: violent weather and Irish.
During the 1982 event, itself held in good conditions, he commented with approval: “We have had bad weather for the pilgrimage over the past few years and this has helped discourage the less religious and committed from climbing up here.”
Similarly, he always insisted on celebrating mass as Gaeilge – still the area’s vernacular – partly as an insurance policy against popularity. As paraphrased by the Connacht Tribune, he thought that those who might like to see the event “upgraded” for tourism purposes would be discouraged by the continuing use of the native language.
Fr MacGréil died in 2023 but when Fr Francis Mitchell said mass at the shrine earlier this month, it was still in Irish, while the hundreds who attended from both sides of the mountain were predominantly locals for whom this remains the mother tongue.
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The first people I spoke to that day had the surname Joyce – what were the chances? They were not the giant male Joyces the Scottish travel writer met in 1834, but a group of women: two sisters, Mary and Breda, and their cousin Shannon Cleere from Seattle, who was making her first pilgrimage to the shrine.
In an area dense with Joyces, you need nicknames (or more often three-generation patronymics – father, grandfather, and great-father usually) to distinguish families. These were the “Tommy-Tom-Tom” Joyces, I learned, a nominal homogeneity that nevertheless sets them apart.
Also there was Philip Coyne, whose father Toomy built the altar and chapel. Except for years when he was in England, Philip never misses mass at the shrine (now held three days a year, on St Patrick’s Day and Good Friday as well as early August).
Overseeing the events, meanwhile, was the affable Jack Hanley, who serves as site caretaker. Hanley has been coming here since he was a boy in the 1960s. A decade or so later he was one of those who helped develop the Maamturk Moutains walk, the much longer hiking route that passes through Mám Éan and forms part of the Western Way.
The caretaker lives on the Maam side of the mountain and now uses a quad to get up and down the steep switchbacks at the top of the climb. In Fr MacGréil’s later years, he gave him lifts up and down, behind the quad, in a trailer (“he was not a light man”).
Hanley has seen the fall and rise again of the pilgrimage, which now attracts hundreds on the three red-letter days. But as if to reassure the late Jesuit on the dangers of mass tourism, he has also witnessed changes that make the only potential Airbnb on Mám Éan even less attractive than it once was.
Pointing to Leaba Phádraig, the miniature cave with its unevenly horizontal slab of rock, Hanley recalls that back in the 1960s, “you could go to bed in it”. The comfort levels must have spartan then. But in the years since, visitors chipping away souvenirs have made them more so, he says: “You wouldn’t sleep in it now.”
- The Irish Caminos series continues in The Irish Times on Monday with St Kevin’s Way, Co Wicklow
