On New Year’s Eve, 1602, Domhnall Cam O’Sullivan Beare, a Gaelic chieftain hounded and harassed by English forces after his fighting in the Battle of Kinsale and refusal to submit to the Crown, left Glengarriff in west Cork with 1,000 followers, soldiers and civilians. He marched north through Cork, Tipperary, Galway and Roscommon, fighting fierce, pitched battles almost every day and losing followers to hunger, injury and death.
Two weeks after he quit his homeplace he reached refuge in Brian Óg O’Rourke’s castle in Leitrim. Only 35 of the original thousand who had left west Cork were with him.
Hemmed in by the 2km limit during lockdown, I began to think about walking to the edge of everything, the foot of the sky. When I found O’Sullivan’s historical route, a 700km waymarked trail called the Beara Breifne Way, I had found the line I sought. I wanted to test myself, test my failing body, depleted by perimenopause, to break through the limits home, work and children imposed on me.
Nothing about this would be easy; ordinarily it takes six weeks to through-hike the Beara Breifne Way from Dursey Island in west Cork to Blacklion in Co Cavan, which I, as a single mother, could never do. So I resolved to walk a couple of weekends a month, on my own, to make the most of bank holiday weekends and day trips whenever I could during summer holidays.
My time frame was March 21st to September 21st, equinox to equinox, as I wanted to capture the turning of the seasons. If Domhnall Cam could do it in two weeks, in the depths of a bitter winter with a thousand followers and constant fighting, I could complete it in six months.
I thought I was setting out to write about history and nature. Instead, I found a living tapestry, of ancient landscapes saturated with myth and memory, roads of ghosts and clattering bones. Unsure of my ability to complete it at the beginning, last March, as the kilometres unfurled beneath my feet, my confidence returned as my fitness and strength grew. By walking through Ireland, I carved a line of connection in time, not only to history, to the Gaelic Irish, but also, back to myself.
I wrote a diary along the way, which has become a book. In this extract, I’m writing about the Slí Gaeltacht Mhuscraí, the second stage of the Beara Breifne Way, from Kealkill in west Cork to Millstreet in north Cork. This is the first section of the stage, which I walked at the start of May last year, a strenuous trail taking me through the Shehy mountains.
‘While there is much I do not know, this I know for sure: how beautifully safe I am, how held the mountains make me feel.’ Photograph: Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto/Getty Slí Gaeltacht Mhuscraí, Kealkill-Gougane Barra, 17km
It is pushing six as I reach Lough Fadda, its shining reaches irresistible to me, and I strip and immerse myself in its cool black depths. This is the reward for all the toil, as my overheated body finally gets to cool down, and the peaty brown waters of the lake soothe and still me. There is not a sound, only the wind whistling over the rocks. When I come out of the water and move on, I can see Gougane Barra below me.
The descent is steep, immediate and challenging, the path a rolling river of stone and scree. So many times I lose my footing and my poles save me from a nasty fall. I’m starting to enjoy it now, the sun is losing its power, and I’m alone in this golden landscape of rock and turf, bog and lake, stone and mountain, endless vistas and blue sky with the bright ball of the sun imperceptibly tracking over my head.
While there is much I do not know, this I know for sure: how beautifully safe I am, how held the mountains make me feel. I am on top of everything and as free and as safe as it is possible to be. Walking like this on the very top of a mountain when the only thing around me is air, light, sky and rock, when I know I have hours to go before I have to leave this space, is a kind of paradise for me.
Copper mine ruins at Allihies, on the Beara Peninsula. Photograph: Arthur Ward/Tourism Ireland
This feeling of awe can actually slow time for us, it’s a rare reverence that occasionally strikes us, that makes us stop, appreciate the world, wonder at it, marvel at it, and can make the time we spend doing it, stretch out, bend around corners we can’t see. Time becomes slippery, undefined, elastic.
I spent so much time today concerned and worried about time and now I realise as I stand in this magical place, on the summit of Lackavane, in the dip between Conigar and Foilastookeen, the hours I spent getting here don’t matter. All that matters is that I am here in this outdoor palace of wonder and beauty, deep in the pure and inalienable perfection of a mountaintop, with its arrangement of glacial lakes and strewn boulders, its confluence of water, rock, air, sky.
I turn back to look at how far I have come and am pleased with my pitiful, painfully slow progress. Before me, spread out like a tapestry, is more mountain, plain, townlands, farms, forest, bog, hill and road. I can see for miles, I can see all the way to north Cork and the distance I have to walk across, the tail end of the Derrynasaggart mountains and the faint beginnings of the Ballyhouras. It’s time, maybe, on this superb evening of gold, to stop thinking about time.
As I descend, the sun drops to a point on the far side of the mountains rising from the lake, Carran, Bealick and Com an tSagairt. As it sets, a golden light pours out of it, swathing the green velvet tops of the mountain in a river of light, and then, miraculously it pours down the mountain in a river, a waterfall of pulsing gold, mobile, pure, resonant with power, a dropping, cascading river of molten, liquid gold, incandescent and fleeting, and seemingly only something I, high on my mountain eyrie am here to witness, along with birds and sheep and the very sky itself.
Miriam Mulcahy on the Beara Breifne Way
I pick my way through the rocky descent. I stop, I stare, I laugh in giddiness and wonder and come to realise, if I had been faster, if I had not toiled so slowly up the other side of the mountain there is no way I would have witnessed this, but I am more than witnessing, I realise that I am part of this light, this sunset, this sunburst. The shadows, the depth and length of them on the mountains are utterly astonishing in their obtuseness and complexity. I’m reminded of what the sun reveals, illuminates, but also what it fails to touch. The shadows become so deep and heavy they pour over the mountain, plummet over the cliffs and swim, dive into the lake.
It is something that will repeatedly happen over the course of the walk. I do things that are hard, difficult, impossible and I am rewarded with infinite riches, better than any balance in any bank account, because these are fortunes of the soul: private, deep, embedded in me.
Nothing can ever undo them, they will only be amplified with time.
Later that night, in the Gougane Barra Hotel bar, owner Neil Lucey talks at length about the challenges the Beara Breifne Way faces, the difficulties of the struggle between what is a community endeavour and the control state agencies seek to bring to bear on it. He talks about the landscape, the precious sacredness of what is there, and tells me about a church I would see after Ballingeary, Teampaillín Aughris, or Eachros as it is noted on the map.
“It moved itself one night,” he says, completely straight-faced, “Henry VIII was dismantling the churches and it knew it was in danger, so it saved itself, and moved from one townland to another, and it’s now in Goirtín na Coille, five miles away. The people got up one morning and saw their church was gone, then they heard it had turned up in some other place.”
Gougane Barra, Co Cork. Photograph: Fáilte Ireland
I laugh at this, but he keeps his straight face, his equanimity, looks at me and holds my gaze, steps into a stillness that is old, ancient, laden with a long-forgotten wisdom. “Draíocht,” he says simply and shrugs his shoulders, like the burden of proof is on me. “You’ll know when you get there. It’s the first place Domhnall Cam made camp after leaving Glengarriff.” And he stands, collects glasses, shakes the mantle of storyteller from his shoulders and resumes the business of hospitality.
Draíocht, the Irish for magic. For druidism, also enchantment and spells. A geasa, I remember from my schooldays, is an unbreakable spell of obligation, a binding spell, where the bewitched have to carry out their task no matter what. Gráinne laid a geasa on Diarmuid, one of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s best warriors, and escaped with him, fleeing a life where she would be tied to the older Fionn.
The landscape is doing that to me. The walk is arduous, difficult, expensive, lonely, but the land is placing me under a geasa droma draíochta, an inviolable magic spell. I begin to sense, here in a sacred valley in the depths of west Cork, I am following some kind of line, a line I have no name for or fix on right now, some kind of thread constantly pulling me north. Yes, I am chasing history, following the path of Domhnall Cam O’Sullivan Beare, but I am also, I’m starting to realise, following some kind of internal line within myself. Whether it will unravel me or wrap something tight, inviolable and binding around me I have no clue yet.
Walking to the Foot of the Sky by Miriam Mulcahy is published by Eriu.