Qualla: Croagh Patrick

Croagh Patrick: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul McIlroy, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the last Sunday of every July, as many as 40,000 people climb a single pyramid of quartzite rising 764 metres above Clew Bay. Some climb barefoot. Some carry stones. Some have walked through the night to reach the base by dawn. They are doing what Irish people have done on this mountain since at least the Middle Ages, and possibly since the Bronze Age before that. The mountain is Croagh Patrick. Locals call it the Reek, from the Hiberno-English word for a stack. Saint Patrick is said to have fasted on its summit for forty days, like Moses on Sinai, and ever since, the slope has belonged as much to faith as to geology.

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Image: Paul McIlroy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Croagh Patrick: The Holy Mountain Before Patrick

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul McIlroy, CC BY-SA 2.0. The archaeologist Christiaan Corlett, surveying the prehistoric monuments that ring the Reek, concluded that the mountain has been a local spiritual inspiration since at least the Neolithic. By the Bronze Age it had become the focus of an extensive ritual landscape. A short walk ...

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Image: Paul McIlroy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Croagh Patrick: Patrick's Forty Days

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. In the 7th century, the Connacht writer Tirechan recorded that Saint Patrick spent forty days on the mountain. The 9th-century Bethu Phadraic adds that demons in the form of black birds harassed Patrick at the summit until he banished them into a hollow called Lugnademon, the hol...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Croagh Patrick: Reek Sunday

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Pingstone, Public domain. The folklorist Maire MacNeill argued that the pilgrimage predates Christianity entirely. In her view, the climb was originally a ritual of Lughnasadh, the Celtic harvest festival. Christianity absorbed and renamed it. Today the climb takes place on the last Sunday of July, and Ma...

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Image: Adrian Pingstone | Public domain

Croagh Patrick: The Erosion of Faith

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Forty thousand pilgrims a year, climbing a single steep slope of loose quartzite, leaves a mark. By the 2010s the mountain was suffering severe erosion that made the climb increasingly dangerous. Local stakeholders responded by building a stone path up the mountain, composed of s...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Croagh Patrick: The Gold the Mountain Keeps

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Andrew2606 at English Wikipedia., CC BY 3.0. In the 1980s a seam of gold was discovered in the core of the Reek. The discovery could have been transformative for the local economy, and applications for mining licences followed. But the Mayo Environmental Group, headed by Paddy Hopkins, organised resistance, and Mayo County ...

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Image: The original uploader was Andrew2606 at English Wikipedia. | CC BY 3.0