Buen Camino! Walk the Camino de Santiago with a Father and Daughter E-Book

Peter Murtagh

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Have you ever dreamed about walking the Camino de Santiago? Join Peter Murtagh, acclaimed Irish journalist, and his teenage daughter Natasha on their epic pilgrimage across the Way of St James and experience their life-changing adventure with them.If you've ever wondered what a hike of 900 miles involves, physically and emotionally, look no further than Buen Camino! You will be transported to Northern Spain, to bull-running and fiestas, to prayers and ancient Christian churches, to a gruelling trek that leads to a spiritual transformation. You'll meet a motley crew of Camino pilgrims, stay with Peter and Natasha in Spartan hostels, learn about the history of the Camino and, above all, laugh and cry with a loving father and daughter as they walk steps trod by thousands of religious travellers before them.Whether you're a seasoned 'peregrino' seeking to relive your glorious Camino days, a Camino novice looking for stories of Camino veterans or someone who's never even heard of the Camino, Buen Camino! is a must-read, full of drama, exhilaration, love, laughter and spiritual and emotional revelations.More than just a travelogue, Buen Camino! is the unique story of the shared emotional journey of a loving Irish father and daughter and of the deep family bond their shared journey of self-discovery forges. Be seduced by the spirit of the Camino and join Peter and Natasha as they follow the ancient route of Irish monks on pilgrimage and find a way of living in the world more simply.Light in weight, and available as an ebook, this is the perfect Camino companion. 'A lovely book for those who have done the Camino, or like me, are thinking of doing it'The Dubliner'An addictive, funny, heart-warming, informative read' The Irish Mail

Leseprobe

BUEN CAMINO!

A father–daughter journey from Croagh Patrick to Santiago de Compostela

NATASHA MURTAGH AND PETER MURTAGH

Gill & Macmillan

The walking pilgrim

With scarce belongings on your back

And enormous heritage in your soul.

Free from material things,

You greet many people

And love even more,

Free from material things,

You smile to all,

And give away good wishes.

This is how you will climb and climb,

Feet firmly on the ground,

Walking to your dream.

Pilgrim, walk in freedom,

Walk without your belongings;

Pilgrim, always towards your destination,

But never alone.

You encounter many in your way,

And they remain forever in your heart.

You carry them in your rose-scented hands,

With which you give not only objects

But also joy.

Pilgrim, may God remain forever

Wherever you transit.

POEM IN A CHURCH ON THE CAMINO

| INTRODUCTION

The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage to the reputed tomb of St James, whose shrine is in the great cathedral named in his honour in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwest Spain. The Camino is over 1,000 years old and is rich in Christian history and heritage, and indeed in pre-Christian history as well. It attracts people of all faiths and, increasingly, people of none.

Like all pilgrimages, the Camino is a journey. It is an actual physical journey in the sense that it is a walk (or a cycle) from the Pyrénées in France, across Navarra and into Pamplona, then on to the Rioja and across the great Meseta Alta, the high plateau of central northern Spain, home to the cities of Burgos and León, and finally over the mountains of León into Galicia and to the beautiful city of Santiago. The distance is a little short of 800 kilometres, and for those so inclined there is a further 85-kilometre Camino to Finisterre, to the end of the earth, where the sun sets beyond the horizon in the Atlantic Ocean.

For some pilgrims, the Camino is a journey intimately connected to their faith, or perhaps faltering faith, in God, and a quest for renewal. But the appeal of the Camino is very broad, and for many who undertake it the pilgrimage is a journey of a different sort. It may be a journey of examination of one’s life to date, taking slices of time and events from a shelf of one’s memory and examining them. It may be a journey taken in remembrance of a recently departed loved one, a time to process feelings and raw emotions, a way of saying goodbye. It may be a journey away from something, the pressures of contemporary life perhaps, which turns into a journey towards something else, a changed life. It may be a journey that is quite simply the pressing of a pause button, time out to take stock.

In all cases the Camino is an opportunity for contemplation and reflection, and many people who undertake the journey find that this contemplative aspect of the pilgrimage has a strongly spiritual side to it.

The history of the Camino is intimately connected to the growth of Catholicism in Spain and the re-conquest of the country from the Moors. Religion can be very much part of the Camino for those who want it. But nothing is forced and many non-Roman Catholics, such as ourselves, feel perfectly at home, and are welcomed, when they choose to participate in Masses or other purely religious aspects of Camino life.

There are several different Camino routes in Spain, some starting in France and indeed elsewhere in western Europe. We walked the Camino Francés, the so-called French Way which is the main Camino and goes from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the Pyrénées to Santiago and on to Finisterre. We began our Camino by climbing Croagh Patrick in Co. Mayo on Reek Sunday to make a special connection between our home in Ireland and our pilgrimage in Spain. We did the Camino simply because we love it and wanted to write a book about it—a book about ourselves and the people we met on the way—and to do it as father and daughter; spending time together, having fun together. Because we walked part of the Camino before, 300 kilometres from León to Santiago, we knew what to expect. We love the people we meet, the friends we make, the places we see and stay in, and the fun and challenge of it all. We love the countryside through which we walk and the altered perspective on life that comes from living simply when you turn away, even for a short time, from the pressure and demands of contemporary, urban living.

This is not a guide book, though we hope it will prove helpful to anyone contemplating doing the Camino. You don’t have to walk nearly 900 kilometres to experience the Camino. You can do it in stages over several years. But if you do decide to do it, and however you do it, you are highly likely to have an experience that will be with you for a long time and that you will find enriching and uplifting and very rewarding. We certainly did.

And as you move, unhurried, savouring the experience, people along the way will greet you by saying Buen Camino!—which means, in effect, “Enjoy it.”

| MAPS

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| IRELAND

I

Sunday 25 July 2010Reek Sunday in MayoSt James’s Day in Santiago de Compostela

PETER: We began the ascent at 3.35 am. In the dark. And the mist. And the drizzle, the almost always present Mayo drizzle.

That was the way we wanted it. Do Croagh Patrick in the night and aim to be at the summit for the sunrise.

Reek Sunday, 25 July—St James’s Day. The big day in Santiago de Compostela. A convenient symmetry with the Galician city, destination of all Camino pilgrims; a couple of countries and just two flights away. And because of that symmetry, we—Natasha, my 18-year-old daughter, and I—decided to begin our Camino by scaling the Reek, Ireland’s Holy Mountain overlooking Clew Bay in Co. Mayo.

It seemed like a good idea, one that was challenged at 2.45 am when the alarm went off telling us to get up and out of bed in the pitch dark. My brother Nigel and sister Jane agreed to come with us; so too did a neighbour, Austin O’Malley, a veteran of the Reek and of many other hill walks in and around Louisburgh. Just before we left our house in the dark, word came that our immediate neighbours, Gerard and Margaret O’Malley, were also up for it. In fact, they were up for the entire night: first the Daniel O’Donnell concert in Castlebar which gave way to a wedding in Westport and dancing into the small hours. Sure why bother with bed at all? It’s great to be young.

The Reek looked bleak, inasmuch as we could see the Reek at 3.35 am. But after a while, it’s surprising just how much the human eye can detect in the dark. The rocky, gravelly, slippery and in places very, very steep path was quite passable, even in the half light.

NATASHA: Things are looking great already as I zip up my rain coat to shelter my face from the cold wind and spitting rain. As I do so, I think of my Mum and Aunt Dolly who are curled up in their beds back at the house, along with the majority of the country as normal people would be asleep at this hour.

The bottom of the mountain is quite steep, but manageable. It involves a lot of hopping over large rocks and avoiding small streams. Like always I walked ahead and alone. I’m not very talkative when it comes to walking. I’m happy to walk by myself and to just think. Also, as I looked at the vast mountain, which was disappearing behind darkness and mist, I thought I’ll never make it to the top with these oldies dragging me down. I had to ditch them as a matter of survival.

I followed the light of a torch from the person in front of me. From looking at the other torch lights dotted along the path, there seemed to be only a couple of hundred walking at this time. I had a jumper on and was beginning to get warm. As the gradient steepened, I got a call from Uncle Nigel telling me not to go too far ahead. I perched on a rock in the darkness and waited. Once we had all grouped again, I was off.

The trail doesn’t stay manageable for long; after 20 minutes you find yourself panting and needing small breathers. I was now really warm.

PETER: The key is to pace yourself: don’t rush it. It’s not a race but it is a test of endurance and stamina. In 2009 some 28,000 people scaled the 764-metre high mountain on Reek Sunday, the final and most important of several annual summer pilgrimage days.

When we began our ascent in the early hours, the pilgrims were numbered in dozens. A motley collection that included young people out for a laugh, all talk, cans of beer and mobile phones; early birds of one persuasion or another; and the devout who, despite the hour, nonetheless paused at each of the stations and observed their religious duties.

Austin, who was 70 in March, loves the climb. “I’m addicted to it,” he says. “I’m all the time thinking about the next time I’ll do it. I love it. I love the walk and the people you’ll meet on the way.”

The Camino de Santiago is made for Austin. He has a deep spirituality and a love of the world about him. A tall, handsome man with striking blue eyes, Austin sees flowers, shrubs, trees and aspects of the landscape that pass others by. He loves poetry and has a deep appreciation of Irish culture. Austin can sit on the sand dunes above his local beach in the early morning and marvel at the light of the sky and the tone of the colour it gives the sea. He will describe the sight of a wave breaking on the beach and then washing back into the sea to meet a fresh, incoming wave and for the two to collide, in a knife edge of spray, ripping along the length of the strand. He will describe this with the wonder of a child, as though he has just seen it for the first time, even though he has been watching it all his life.

A year ago I met Austin on the Reek and he invited me to join him a week later for a walk up Mweelrea, Connacht’s highest peak, just a few kilometres away. We scaled it in glorious sunshine. I was thrilled he could come to the Reek with Natasha and me for our special climb.

At Tochar Patrick, the point where the ancient pilgrimage route from Ballintubber Abbey via Aughagower joins the path up from Murrisk on the shoulder of the Reek, Austin peers down at a lake below, an almost perfectly circular pool of water some hundred metres beneath us. He picks up a stone, spreads his feet and stands side on to the lake. And then, in the manner of a handball player, he flings the stone underarm with one strong, graceful sweep into the air. Seconds later, there is the sound of a perfect ‘plop!’ as it lands in the centre of the lake.

“God, how did you do that?” I exclaimed.

“It has to be a good flat one,” he advised as I bend down to copy. “Astride now,” he said, “and underarm.”

I flung the rock and it vanished into the heather well short of the lake.

I’m not going to be beaten by a man with 13 years on me, I thought. And so I picked up another rock, a bigger one and no worries about the shape either, just a lump of Croagh Patrick quartz. I flung it over arm as hard as I could and, sure enough, there is a satisfactory splash.

“Isn’t it great to be daft!” exclaimed Austin as we both laughed and moved on up the Reek.

The higher we go, the amount of airborne water in the mist increases and the wind starts to drive it through almost any covering you have on. It’s getting lighter now and just before the summit, at about 5.30 am, the sun rises—not that you can see it clearly for the swirling, driving mist. The final stretch of the climb, the awful, hideously steep scree slope below the summit, is taken foot by careful foot, the wind getting ever stronger. And then the summit opens up, a high vista lashed by the wind and the driving, dripping mist. Visibility can’t be more than 50 kilometres. So much for witnessing the sunrise! The place seems godforsaken: how St Patrick stayed here for 40 days and 40 nights, and sorted out the demon blackbirds, not to mention those snakes and poisonous reptiles, I’ll never know.

NATASHA: The mist is incredibly thick and low. I could only see about 50 metres in front. The climb was getting very steep, very quickly, and the muddy path soon turned to scree, which is very difficult to walk on. The people passing me on their way down looked tired and wet and had pale faces. Yet they seemed to hold a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

I was really near the peak now. The gradient was at its most challenging and I found myself using my hands to pull myself up. The jingling of falling stones would cause my head to rise and avoid the person coming down towards me. Everyone around me was groaning and cursing for the top to appear. People on the way down would smile and say: “Only 10 minutes now.” Well, those 10 minutes were taking about half an hour! With frustration I would burst out in sprints and then stop for a minute. Then sprint again.

Finally, as though God himself tapped me on the shoulder, I looked up and saw a tiny little greyish church. From the bottom of the mountain on a clear day it looks like a magnificent white temple fit for Zeus himself. Nonetheless, it was a church, on Croagh Patrick, at 5.20 am, and I was in front of it.

PETER: People are huddled in the lee of the tiny chapel, sipping hot tea sold from tarpaulin-covered stalls. Some suck on cigarettes, others slug beer. A Jack Russell named Oscar busies himself about the place. Everyone shivers; it’s bitterly cold. The faithful walk devoutly around the church the required number of times. Gerard and Margaret are there first, up the Reek like a pair of whippets. Gerard stands me a welcome cup of hot tea. Then comes Nigel; sadly, the climb was too much for Jane. Finally Austin emerges through the mist, smiling, happy, acknowledging friends along the way.

And all of us, 50 people maybe, stand there in the half light in utterly foul weather, mist and rain swirling around, gusts of wind whipping our backs. And then, just for an instant, the mist parts on the eastern horizon and the sun breaks through. For one or two glimpses it is a blurred haze, then shining bright, then blurred again, then swallowed once more in dense mist. But it’s the sun, minutes after the sunrise, on the summit, on Reek Sunday, on St James’s Day—just as planned. Just as requested.

The descent comes easy; the flow of pilgrims going up has grown from dozens to hundreds—a steady stream of men and women and children, many of them country folk from all parts of Ireland. Their numbers will grow to more than 20,000 by the time the sun sets. And none will be deterred by the weather. Friends passing on the path greet each other and pause for a chat.

“See you next year,” many say, the annual ritual observed as it has been for centuries.

And we head home. Home for a feed of bacon and eggs and sausages and boxty and toast and jam and coffee and warmth and chat with wonderful neighbours.

And after all that, Gerard and Margaret finally get to bed.

______

II

PETER: Today’s pilgrims to Croagh Patrick walk in the footsteps of their ancestors. Long before the early Irish Church, through St Patrick, embraced the Reek, our pagan predecessors had no doubt but that the mountain was a special place. Evidence for this abounds in the landscape around the south shore of Clew Bay.

A few kilometres south and east of Croagh Patrick on a patch of scrubland sandwiched between a cottage and some ugly, breeze-block sheds, there is a rocky outcrop. This is the Boheh Stone upon which are inscribed a mass of swirls and so-called keyhole shapes. The Boheh Stone is one of the most important examples of prehistoric rock art in Britain or Ireland and the only one west of the Shannon. It dates from sometime between 4000 BC and 2500 BC. 4000 BC was the infancy of the Neolithic, the New Stone Age; 2500 BC was the Early Bronze Age. Archaeologists who have examined the stone in detail estimate that it dates from between 2000 BC and 3000 BC—that is, four to five thousand years ago. To put those dates in perspective, when our ancestors in Mayo were grinding their thoughts onto the surface of a rock, Homer was composing the Odyssey; in Egypt, the first pyramids were being erected; in England, Stonehenge was taking shape.

When the sheet ice of the last great Ice Age retreated from Ireland over 7,000 years ago, secreting from beneath itself as it melted a string of muddy hillock clay and boulder drumlins across the country, our ancestors were able to move onto the land thus exposed. The drumlins are there still, stretching in a line east–west across Ireland from Cavan to Mayo and out into Clew Bay. Semi-submerged there, they are the islands that give the bay its distinctive character. The people who gradually colonised the ‘new’ land freed of ice were hunter gatherers, people who caught, killed and ate what they could, and picked wild fruits when they couldn’t. Such people are believed to have lived in Mayo between 5500 BC and 3500 BC.

Fossil pollen analysis, indicating changes to plant life prompted by human activity, suggests that the first farming, that is, the systematic cultivation of crops and rearing of animals, began near Croagh Patrick some 3,500 years ago.1 This way of life gradually replaced hunting and gathering, and with it grew an appreciation and awareness of the seasons: the ebb and flow of the year, the weather and the importance of the sun, the giver of life. The Boheh Stone appears to be an acknowledgment of this. Our ancestors could have crawled out of wherever it was they slept and carved their thoughts onto any rock, of which there is an abundance in Mayo. But they didn’t; they chose the Boheh Stone, from where one has a commanding view of the Reek, its cone standing proud into the sky, higher than anything immediately around it.

The possible significance of the stone was noticed first in the modern era by an amateur archaeologist living in Mayo, Gerry Bracken, who was a retired agricultural scientist. He began a prolonged study of the rock in 1987, and on the evening of 24 August 1991—St Bartholomew’s Day—he saw something magical: for a period of about 20 minutes, the setting sun seemed to roll down the north face of the Reek’s almost perfectly formed cone before disappearing out of sight behind the ridge. The Rolling Sun phenomenon, as it has become known, happens twice a year, on 18 April and on 24 August, the day Gerry Bracken first saw it. These two dates plus 21 December, the Winter Solstice, divide the year into three roughly equal parts equating to the sowing, growing and harvesting seasons, April being associated with sowing, August with harvest.

Bracken was dazed and exhilarated by his discovery. As he noted later, to stand at the Boheh Stone, and to observe its relationship with Croagh Patrick, is to be in no doubt but that ancient man regarded this place as somewhere special, somewhere almost certainly sacred in his mind.2

The Boheh Stone’s so-called cup-and-ring markings seem to confirm this. They are strikingly similar to markings more widely associated with the swirling circle carvings in Newgrange. The stone is “the most comprehensively-worked example of its type in Ireland and distinctive in style from similarly marked stones in Britain or on the Atlantic seaboard of the European Continent,” according to Maarten van Hoek, a Dutch geographer and expert in prehistoric rock art, who has made a detailed study of them.3

“What the special meaning of the keyhole-pattern has been is unknown and may always remain a mystery and a matter of subjective speculation,” according to him. “It has often been suggested that cups and cups-and-rings are symbols of celestial bodies. Just possibly the keyhole pattern is a symbol of a tailed phenomenon once visible in prehistoric skies—a comet possibly. The areas where keyholes are found could be parts of the country where the weather conditions allowed prolonged opportunities to observe this phenomenon.” But that, as he acknowledges, is just speculation.

The Tochar Patrick ancient pilgrimage route passes the Boheh Stone. Today the stone is more commonly known as St Patrick’s Chair, an example of early Christianity embracing pre-Christian culture and practices, making them its own. Another is Lughnasa, the pre-Christian Irish festival honouring the Celtic god Lugh and rooted in Celtic mythology. Lughnasa marked the start of the harvest season and was an occasion for funeral feasts and games in honour of Lugh’s mother, Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing the land for farming. The gathering of the seed to make bread and the ripening of the season’s first fruits, usually wild berries, became a time of community gatherings, market festivals, horse races and reunions with distant family and friends. When Lughnasa was absorbed into Christian ritual among the peoples living on the southern shores of Clew Bay it became known as Domhnach na Cruaiche—or Reek Sunday, then as now a quintessentially rural rite and the most popular pilgrimage day to Ireland’s Holy Mountain.

The Mayo landscape is littered with examples of pre-Christian and Christian practices, blending into a seamless narrative, if one wishes to see it that way. Scattered around the land between Clew Bay and Killary Harbour are megalithic tombs, cairns, standing stones, some of them in rows, others isolated but, viewed from one vantage point, seeming to have a relationship with the Reek and Caher Island, a small island in the Atlantic peppered with early Christian graves.

In 1994 archaeological excavations were carried out on the Reek, at St Patrick’s Oratory, a few metres to the east of the current church on the summit.4 Among the items found were three flints, animal bone, a fragment of iron and one possibly of stone; shards of medieval pottery, two corroded bronze pins, two worked pieces of flint, and fragments of iron. There was some modern glass and iron, modern coins and religious medals. There was charcoal which was carbon dated as originating between 430 AD and 890 AD. Glass beads were found, dating anywhere from the Iron Age to the early medieval period, that is, between the third century BC and the fourth century AD. The Reek is also home to several pre-Christian cairns.

St Patrick came to the Reek in 441 AD. He was on his second visit to Ireland. The first was when he was 16 after he was kidnapped in his native England and made a slave. He escaped after six years, went home and became a priest, returning to Ireland in 432 AD on a mission to bring Christianity to the island. He is said to have travelled west, to Mayo and to Aughagower, near Westport, from where he climbed the Reek, spending 40 days and 40 nights, suffering the attention of those demon birds.

Patrick understood the importance of the sun but he ascribed to it a significance markedly different to the pagans surrounding him. “... For that sun, which we see,” he wrote in his Confession, “by God’s command rises daily for our sakes, but it will never reign, nor will its splendour endure; but all those who worship it shall go in misery to punishment.” And he went on to extol the value of faith in God and to refer to “Christ the true Sun”.

The pagans believed him. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland and the sun worshippers passed, leaving in their wake the likes of the Boheh Stone and other archaeological debris that helps define the landscape. A millennium and a half of Christianity has brought its own heritage. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Irish devotion to St James saw many pilgrims make the arduous journey to Galicia, many of them in wine ships returning empty to Bordeaux. Those that came back to Ireland (many pilgrims died going to, or coming from, Santiago) brought souvenirs. During 1996 excavations at the former Priory of St Mary in Mullingar, for instance, the remains of several monks were exhumed. On each was found a scallop shell, the symbol of St James and a fair indication (though not conclusive evidence) that each had journeyed to Santiago de Compostela to pay homage to James the Great, one of Christ’s inner circle of Apostles. St Mary’s Priory was founded in 1227 and lasted until 1539. An etching in the Dublin Penny Journal of 1836 shows it in poor condition but still standing. However, it fell into greater and greater disrepair and vanished ... until the foundations were rediscovered in 1996. The site is now host to a supermarket.

Another link comes from the early Christian settlement at Illaunloughan Island in Co. Kerry, a tiny place between the mainland coast and Valentia Island. Once again, during recent excavations of graves dating back to the eighth century, fragments of scallop shells were found.

But the most exciting find in recent times was made at Ardfert Cathedral, one of a cluster of churches within a walled burial ground in the village of Ardfert, near Tralee in Co. Kerry. The cathedral may be dated variously from the 11th to the 17th centuries. Between 1989 and 1998 archaeologists excavated parts of it as a restoration programme carried out by the National Monuments Service.

Ardfert comes from Ard ferta in Irish, meaning high burial ground, but may also be derived from Ard Ferta Breanainn, suggesting a link with St Brendan. In an echo of the bird story involving St Patrick on the Reek, Brendan, said to have been born around 484 AD making him a contemporary of the national saint, decided to build a monastery at Killeacle. As he surveyed the area, a bird swooped on him, snatched the plans from his hand and flew off, dropping them at Ardfert and prompting Brendan to build there. In truth, there is no contemporary evidence to support assertions that Brendan founded Ardfert, but the tradition endures.

During the excavations Ardfert yielded up one of the most delightful pieces of evidence of the draw of Santiago de Compostela during the late Middle Ages. In the nave of the cathedral, in a stone-lined grave where two people had been buried, one directly on top of the other, archaeologists found a tiny pendant, a scallop shell of pewter with a gilded figure attached to it. The shell measures approximately four centimetres across and the same from top to bottom. The moulded, gilded figure, who is about three centimetres tall, is soldered onto the front of the shell and looks forward. He is a pilgrim, a man wearing a long cloak and a pilgrim’s hat. In his left hand he is holding a walking staff; his right hand clutches the strap of a satchel which is slung across his shoulder and rests on his hip. His features are clearly visible: nose, eye sockets, hands and fingers. The figure could be St James, who, uniquely, is often portrayed as a pilgrim to his own shrine, or it could simply be a representation of the archetypal pilgrim. But cleaned and polished after conservation, this 500-year-old trinket looks exactly like hundreds of others on sale today in souvenir shops in Santiago.

It’s a fair assumption that one of the people in the grave had made the pilgrimage to Santiago and wore the pendant as a badge of devotion to the saint. Or perhaps this person was given it as a present by someone else who had been to Santiago. Either way, the trinket was treasured sufficiently to be buried with its owner—the scallop shell and pilgrim figure clearly had meaning and was of importance.

At the foot of Croagh Patrick on the shore of Clew Bay there is a place known locally as Murrisknaboll. It is a peninsula surrounded by the sea on three sides; the water is shallow, a good place to land fish from small boats. On a north-facing part of the shore, where the bank joins the beach, there is a shell midden, the remnants of an ancient dump used by fishermen. Archaeologists have estimated that the midden could date from the Mesolithic era, making it among the earliest repositories of evidence of settlement around Croagh Patrick.5 Thousands of years ago, fisherman in dug-out canoes possibly came ashore at this spot and landed their catch, a catch that included shellfish which were eaten and the shells then discarded. When the midden was examined in the 1990s, the archaeologists noted that it contained various shells, mainly oyster and scallop. The sea then was lapping the bank and the archaeologists warned that it was likely to be eaten away, its contents falling back into the sea from whence they came. Since then, a landowner has built up the bank to protect it from further erosion and the midden is now hidden.

A few days before we climbed the Reek at the start of our Camino, I went to the ancient midden. Some scallop shells were visible among the mud and rocks supporting the bank. Could they be from the midden itself, disturbed as the protective earthworks were set in place? It is possible—unlikely, perhaps, but possible nonetheless. The area is littered with oyster shells, debris from a nearby oyster farm. There are scallop shells too, modern ones for sure, further down the shoreline, away from the midden. I took the two scallop shells from among the rocks protecting the midden—two Mesolithic (maybe) scallop shells. They are now attached to our backpacks, proclaiming Natasha and me to be pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela, in the manner of a tradition going back more than a thousand years.

And so we are off. Breakfast eaten; hugs, kisses and goodbyes exchanged, we’re away to Knock airport, and then Gatwick, and Bordeaux for one night before we head into the Pyrénées. A scallop shell on our backpacks and a little silver box in my pocket.

1. Morahan, Leo, Croagh Patrick, Co. Mayo—archaeology, landscape and people, p. 15.

2. Cathair na Mart—Journal of the Westport Historical Society, No 12, 1992; article by Bracken, who died in December 2007, and the late Patrick Wayman, director of the Dunsink Observatory, pp 1–12.

3. Cathair na Mart, No 15, 1995; pp 15–25.

4. See Morahan.

5. See Morahan, p. 30.

| FRANCE

PETER: The contrast between the TGV and the little train could not be greater. The TGV—smooth, slick and modern, the pride of French railways—glides silently on unbroken tracks, making hardly a sound. We have flown from Knock to Gatwick and from there to Bordeaux where we spent the night. Now we ride the TGV to Bayonne; it is a flawless, technological performance. There is nothing wrong or flawed about the little old diesel train that chugs from Bayonne to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the start of the Camino in the Pyrénées. It is just from another era. It has a comforting, old-world rhythm—clunkedy-clunk, clunkedy-clunk, clunkedy-clunk, clunkedy-clunk; and, when it passes over points, clunkedy-clunkedy-clunkedy-clunkedy, before it settles down again to the more familiar clunkedy-clunk, clunkedyclunk, clunkedy-clunk.

The little engine heaves its way high into the mountains, the land and vegetation changing as we pass. Wide, flat fields with maize give way to a patchwork of smaller fields, each one on a slope and most playing host to dairy cattle. The flat fields that remain are in bends of a river valley and most are used to grow vegetables. It is all very lush, very pastoral and Alpine in appearance.

St-Jean is a medieval citadel town built of old red sandstone. There must be a local authority ordinance that directs everyone to paint the outside walls of their properties white and the woodwork a deep, dull red because they are all like that. The town is pretty and touristy. Geraniums sprout from window boxes; shops cater for the pilgrim market—or, one suspects, those who want pilgrim memorabilia but without actually doing the walking.

The pilgrim office, from where one must obtain one’s pilgrim passport, the credencial del peregrino, is on rue de la Citadelle, a cobbled street inside the old town that runs parallel to the city walls, right down to the river. The office is manned by volunteers from Les Amis du chemin de Saint-Jacques Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Only bona fide pilgrims may enter here; it is not a tourist office. The walls are covered with pictures of the Camino and practical advice to starters: what to wear, where to stay, weather reports, and some statistical information as well. Religious music wafts gently from a CD player. There are four desks, behind which sit les quatre volunteers. The whole place exudes an unhurried but efficient calm.

“Ga’day, mate! How can I help you?”

It’s Peter from Australia, a 77-year-old (as of 29 July) retired civil engineer from Colac, a place about 250 kilometres from Melbourne. Like so many other people, Peter came upon the Camino by chance. And like them, he was seduced and it is now a significant part of his life. It began when he was in Brittany in the late 1990s chasing ancestral family links and, with his civil engineering skills, finding himself helping a local archaeological dig. St James figured prominently and, curious as he learned more of the links between France and the Apostle, Peter walked part of the Camino, from León to Santiago, in 2002. The following year, he did another section, and another in 2004, still another in 2008. Now in 2010, he’s working in the Camino office in St-Jean.

“I haven’t met anybody who hasn’t said after doing the Camino that it changed their life in some way,” he explained. And what impact did it have on him? “I had fallen out with my sister many, many years ago. It was awful: her family didn’t speak to me and mine and we didn’t speak to her or hers. So the first thing I did after my Camino when I went home was go around to her and apologise. ‘Whatever it was’, I said, ‘sorry, it was my fault and we should never have let it get to this.’ And now we’re fine. I also got rid of a lot of garbage in my life after my Camino. I resigned from a whole lot of things and now I do a lot of voluntary work.

“The Camino’s not religious for me, it’s spiritual. The ambiance of the Camino is fantastic. I like nature, I like walking, I like to go walkabout back home. After the Camino, after walking, you realise that in civilisation you are dealing with a lot of bullshit.”

Peter is a self-evidently happy, balanced, cheery man who takes pleasure in helping people and engaging with them and their lives. A survey of pilgrims’ motivations carried out by the office until 2002 used to include a multi-optional question about motivation. But it was dropped when they ran out of options that seemed to match the reasons: at the time, a mere 20 per cent of pilgrims filling in the form gave religion as their motivation for doing the Camino. More and more people simply wanted time to opt out of their everyday life at home for a multiplicity of reasons: it might be needing time to process feelings after the death of someone close; or it might be an inchoate but irresistible desire to escape from technology.

The relatively minor place accorded to formal religion as a motivation for doing the Camino is evident from a glance through the office visitor book to which pilgrims are invited to contribute their thoughts before setting off. “Charming village,” noted a couple from England; “It’s so hot! Happy Canada Day!” wrote Robert Ring; “In memory of [name indecipherable] on her birthday,” wrote Jill and Thomas Payne; “Everything is done. Forget everything and start new,” advised someone who signed themselves St-Jean; “My spiritual vacance [sic],” wrote Anna from Seoul; “For our friends and family. May God send down His grace upon us all,”—JMS; “A journey individually, together, and as a community,” was the hope of Jennifer; “10-year anniversary of our first Camino. Back in 2010!” enthused Jean and Jim.

And for Natasha and me? “May this Camino be as enriching and uplifting as my first,” was my wish.

We present ourselves to another of the assistants and get our pilgrim passports which are essential for staying in the albergues, the hostels that dot the entire Camino all the way to Santiago. These cater especially for pilgrims and charge peppercorn rates for bunk beds, usually between €4 and €8. You cannot book; you just turn up from around mid-day on; preference is given to foot pilgrims; cyclists have to wait their turn. The man who fills out our pilgrim passports misreads my Irish passport. Instead of transcribing my surname, he transcribes my nationality. Camino statistics will show that a ‘M. Éireannach’—Mr Ireland—received his Camino passport on 26 July 2010!

And so to bed in the albergue up the street—a bunk bed in a room with 10 others, in an 18th-century stone house with incredible views ... and all for just €8 each.

| OUR CAMINO

St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Roncesvalles: 27 km in 6.5 hours

NATASHA: Walking out of the albergue, the streets of St-Jean are empty. The evening before, they were bustling with life. Tourist families were floating up and down the cobble-stone surfaces, children running in and out of doors; pilgrims marching like soldiers, eager to register in the Camino office and receive their passports.

The same street is very different at 7.00 am. A thin darkness covers the buildings; nearly every shutter on every house is closed. The only noise that disturbs the sleeping town is the light tinkle of walking poles hitting the cobbles as the pilgrims set out for the mountains. As Dad and I walk down the street in the old town, the air is filled with a light smell of fresh breads and pastries. These are the first real steps of our Camino, which will bring us over the Pyrénées and west across Spain, all the way to Santiago de Compostela.

St-Jean ends abruptly and we are immediately surrounded by lush green fields and the noises of distant farm animals. The walk begins tough; the road out of St-Jean is very, very steep. It slithers between fields, leading us higher and higher. The countryside is rather like Ireland, as a girl from Belgium, another pilgrim on the way to Santiago, remarked.

I was expecting the sun to burst through as soon as the night sky had gone completely, but it didn’t. Instead, a heavy white mist remained. I was grateful, as the climb alone was making me sweat. The road was bordered with delicate little flowers of purples and yellows. As we got higher there were spits of gorse that had been ambushed by vast amounts of what looked like little silver bowls. These turned out to be spiders’ webs that sat flippantly on the plants, catching little dew beads and bouncing in the breeze. I leaned a little closer to examine one of these impressive works of art, but was turned away quickly by the threatening stare of the occupant, perched at the side.

At the top of each hill we take a breather and listen to the faint ringing of cow bells coming from the vanishing valley below. The higher we get, the colder it gets. At one stage I lost Dad. I didn’t notice when it happened, but after making it to the top of a long, sheer road, I took a breather at the side, to wait for him. But he didn’t come. I was thinking he was just struggling with the gradient. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I took my bag off and sat on the side of the road and waited and waited. I began to think I had taken a wrong turn when two cyclists appeared through the mist. Exhausted and out of breath, one of them said in Italian: “Natasha, indietro!” or something along those lines. I laughed and nodded, pretending I understood what he was saying. But really, I was confused: how did he know my name? Then I thought it must have been Dad. I turned my phone on and rang him; I had gone the wrong way. Brilliant! So I began my trek back down the way I had come.

PETER: After two hours we reached a place named Orisson, little more than a bend in the road but with a welcome café. It is 790 metres up—higher than Croagh Patrick—and it has taken a hard, two-hour slog to get here. Coffee and bread was never more welcome and a chance to replenish our water bottle. The café owner says the rest of the gradient for the remainder of our trek across the Pyrénées will not be as steep. He gestures with the palm of his hand, showing a more gentle climb. Nonetheless, we have another 600 metres to surmount.

NATASHA: The café owner said there was nothing from now on until we got to Roncesvalles. The road ahead wasn’t as steep as before, but it was still challenging. We began to get very high, very quickly. Stopping had made me cool down and the sweat from my clothes had turned cold. The mist was still very heavy and low, and walkers that were ahead of us were sucked in and would disappear from vision, like a pirate ship at sea. We cross a cattle grid and are now in upland commonage—no fences, no hedges and very few trees. But lots of grass, lots of sheep and some horses. The edges of the road are sprinkled with crowds of what look like sea holly and nettles. Only the noise of a car would make us move to the side, as seeing it was impossible until the headlights poked through the mist.

PETER: There’s a refrain in the film Local Hero in which a noisy motorcyclist zips through a Scottish seaside village at the precise moment the main character, a hapless American oilman, tries to cross the road to use the phone box. No explanation is ever offered as to why the motorcyclist whizzes by; he just does. Near the top of the Pyrénées, there’s a small white Renault van that keeps emerging from the mist. We hear it first—a high-pitched engine, somewhere out there, somewhere in the mist, unsure whether it is in front of us or behind. And then it appears, always in front. And always driven by what looks like the same middle-aged farmer. There’s a big dog in the rear that snarls and yaps at us through the back window as the van disappears once more into the mist. Twenty minutes or so later, the van’s back. Same routine, same driver, same yapping dog and always coming at us from the front. Weird. But funny too. They’re probably still up there, tootling about in the mist, yapping at pilgrims ...

Suddenly there’s a break in the mist and out of it emerges Jan, standing behind a table which he has set up under a lean-to canopy in front of his white Citroën transit van. He is surrounded by sheep and pilgrims, who have plonked themselves on the grass and are eating and drinking.

“Hello,” says Jan with excessive cheeriness. “Where are you from?”

“Ireland,” I say.

“Ah! My first today.”

And with that he turns to the side of his van, takes out a felt tip pen and adds me to the list of nationalities that he has written down the outside of the driver’s door. There’s information written all over the side of the van: we are 1,200 metres up, with 11 kilometres to go to Roncesvalles. Jan dispenses Lidl-sourced chocolate bars and juices; everything seems to sell for €1. Clever Jan offers the only respite for kilometres in either direction and just about everybody walking past gives him their custom.

NATASHA: Soon after Jan, the mist cleared for good as we rose through it and welcomed the much missed warm sun. For the first time in ages, we can see in the distance the beautiful countryside we had been walking through. In front of us in a great panorama—Spain! The sky is a magnificent, completely clear blue. The path now has signposts, each with the scallop shell in yellow and blue, the colours of the Camino. The signs tell us we have two hours and 15 minutes until we reach Roncesvalles. We are feeling every muscle in our legs but we’re sure we can make it.

The path gradually makes its way down towards the treeline, to hedgerows and small trees and then a beech forest—a small one at first after which we emerge into scrubby fields and then into another beech forest, a vast, enormous wood than seems to go on forever, and forever downwards. My legs start to wobble like jelly; Dad’s were the same. Walking down can be just as hard as going up. We had to be very careful not to let our knees bend too much and just collapse down hill.

Though difficult, our path is extremely beautiful. We are enveloped in gigantic green forest where the floor is cool and sheltered from the sun, dappled light dancing on the path. Where there are gaps in the trees, beams of light hit the forest floor and there are explosions of ferns and grass and berry bushes.

And then a sign telling us Roncesvalles was less than a kilometre away. Ahead of us as we emerge from the forest onto a broad, open path, there are two women walking. One has no backpack and seems to be struggling. The other, walking in front of her, carries two bags. As we pass them, the bag-less girl is in tears and seems to be in a lot of pain. She is Italian. The other girl is Austrian. They met this morning, and coming down the mountain the Italian girl fell and hurt her leg. She is devastated, in pain and angry with herself. She thinks her leg is broken. Dad gets a man in a car to bring her to the albergue and an ambulance is called. I felt so sorry for her; her Camino is over before it has really begun.

______

RONCESVALLES

PETER: Roncesvalles is a very substantial religious settlement at the foot of the Pyrénées in Navarra and is the first major point of departure on the Camino in Spain. There are two routes to Roncesvalles from France: one is the Cize Pass, up and over the Pyrénées, which is the one Natasha and I took, like almost all other pilgrims; the other is via Valcarlos, a way that follows much of the modern road into Spain from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and which derives its name from the fact that Charlemagne’s army suffered a great defeat there, or thereabouts, in 778 AD.

History, myth, legend and lies all combine in and around Roncesvalles. They do so to such an extent that it is almost impossible to disentangle the story of the development of the Camino from the 9th century on and the great French/Spanish drive simultaneously against the Moors, the Reconquest of Spain. They have become part of the overall story. On the one hand, there was the secular political imperative on the part of the French and the dispossessed rulers across northern Spain to regain territorial control from the Moors. On the other, the Catholic Church wanted to rid Iberia of Islam. In this, the church’s great driving force was the Benedictine abbey at Cluny in France, which had imperialistic ambitions to extend its rule far and wide. To this end, it funded the building of religious communities in France and Spain, and the means to move between them.

It was good luck indeed that in 813 AD, the Galician hermit Pelayo heard music and saw lights above a place known as campo stella—the field of stars. Stars were already an established part of life across much of northern Spain: the Milky Way, whose stars seems to ‘flow’ west, directed pagans to a place they knew as the end of the earth, finis terra, where they saw the sun, their giver of life, disappear into the sea beyond the horizon only to return the next day, reborn. They traversed an east/west road or path which opened the way to and from the mineral-rich areas of Asturias and Galicia and which the Romans then used as a template for much of their road across northern Spain, the Via Traiana. In northern Spain as elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, the sky at night can be filled with shooting stars, in the summer months in particular. But the ones Pelayo said he saw directed him to a particular spot on Mount Libredón. And there he found the graves of three people whom the bishop on the Galician port city of Iria Flavia, Bishop Teodomiro, quickly ‘confirmed’ were the remains of St James the Greater and two of his disciples, Atanasio and Teodoro. James was no ordinary saint: of the 12 Apostles, he was one of the three closest to Jesus Christ and may even have been related to him through his mother, who was related to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

No one knows how James came to be buried in Galicia. Medieval assertions have him preaching there after Christ’s edict to his disciples to spread his Word. It was claimed that James went to ‘western places’, said to be Galicia. He preached and recruited seven followers but returned to Jerusalem where he fell foul of King Herod and was beheaded in 44 AD. Somehow his body was returned to Galicia (in a stone boat without oars or sails, according to one version) and was buried in secret ... until Pelayo the hermit came along at a most politically and religiously opportune moment. Between James’s death and the discovery of his remains, the Romans had left Iberia and were replaced by the Visigoths, who were themselves displaced by the Moors. But the Moors never quite got all of Iberia and, in the north, small groups of Visigoth Christians remained. Their ultimate reconquest of Spain took all of 800 years. The Moors rode into battle with relics of the prophet Mohammed. The Christians had no such inspiration to steel their nerves; but the finding by the hermit Pelayo gave them a powerful, and locally based, talisman.

Over the succeeding decades and centuries, a church and eventually several cathedrals were built in the campo stella, which soon became Santiago—Spanish for Saint James—of Compostela, hence Santiago de Compostela. The relics of the saint were kept inside the holy shrine and were fought over many times. Miracles began to be attributed to the saint and James himself appeared, at one time riding to war as Santiago Matamoros, St James the Moor Slayer, smiting Saracens all about him and making a decisive intervention that turned a major battle into a Christian rout of their enemies. On another occasion, a horseman was said to have fallen into the sea off Galicia and James appeared to save him, pulling the man from what would have been a watery grave. The rider emerged from the sea festooned with scallop shells. These quickly become the enduring symbol of the saint and are today worn by almost every single pilgrim who makes the journey to Santiago de Compostela.

But there is reason to suspect that, like so much else in Christianity, the story of the scallop shell may be deeper, richer and more complex. The scallop has been associated with notions of fertility, and hence birth and re-birth, since at least the 8th century BC when the Greek oral poet Hesiod explained the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. She was said to have emerged from the sea off Cyprus floating on a scallop shell. The motif turns up in a Christian context around 245 AD in a painting above the Torah shrine in a synagogue in Dura Europos, a city on the eastern bank of the Euphrates in modern-day Syria. And we find it also in a poem by the Christian Sophronius, who was born in Damascus in 550 AD and became Patriarch of Jerusalem in 633 AD. One of his compositions is The Anastasis, which in ancient Greek means resurrection, in which there is a claim that Christ’s tomb was surrounded by shells (conches), also suggesting rebirth.

Let me walk thy pavements

and go inside the Anastasis,

where the King of All rose again,

trampling down the power of death.

I will venerate the sweet floor,

and gaze on the holy Cube,6

and the great four ...

... like the heavens.

Through the divine sanctuary

I will penetrate the divine Tomb,

and with deep reverence

will venerate that Rock.

And as I venerate that worthy Tomb,

surrounded by its conches

and columns surmounted by golden lilies,

I shall be overcome with joy.

None of this detracts from the validity of people’s faith or devotions, in my view. It just makes it all more interesting—richer, deeper, more layered and colourful. Symbolism was an enormously powerful force in the Middle Ages and a powerful tool in the hands of those promoting devotion to St James and also those who saw securing Spain for Catholicism as part of the one battle against Islam. (For similar reasons, the dictator Franco invoked Santiago Matamoros as he sought to entrench Catholicism in Spain following his Civil War victory in 1939.)