Walks: Croagh Patrick, Co Mayo - a sunlit island in a sea of cloud

The “Reek” or Croagh Patrick needs no introduction. It was St Patrick in the 5th century who first brought it to our attention. He came to take on one of the last human-sacrificing druids in Ireland, and to cleanse the mountain of its pagan – even demonic – associations in the process.

Away before that our very distant ancestors aligned stone at it and even used the summit as a fort or refuge. And long before that again it had presided for millennia over a vast slow-moving ice field that had filled Clew Bay, helping to steer it to a distant icy sea beyond Clare Island.

It watched global warming slowly decay and melt the ice, leaving untidy drumlin debris heaps which a slowly returning sea made into the islands of our most beautiful of bays.

I came to it in February for the umpteenth time up the worn pilgrims’ track beyond the statue of the saint – a temporary hole in the clouds revealing its summit and working its magic.

A sunny start soon became something more familiar, with cloud swirling out of nowhere. Near the summit a couple of people descending said I “might be lucky” (ie, I might see something) but I had heard that before!

But I was “lucky” – more so than I have ever been on the summit of the Reek. I had ascended out into an impossibly high and different world, only the little 1906 chapel under a faultless sky familiar to me. All around was a sea of cloud, silver and gold below the lowering sun, a dirty cotton wool colour to the east. There were no Nephinbeg mountains or Slievemore or Croughaun on Achill, only a slow-motion turbulence, like the sea over a submerged rock, marking their presence beneath the cloud.

But away in the distance, like a rocky desert island, was a tiny Nephin mountain (806m) only about 200m in the sun. I felt drawn to it; was there another hiker over there sharing my sunlit world and admiring the Reek from his or her vantage-point? I couldn’t leave; I considered staying for the sunset as I watched the appropriately haloed shadow of “Ireland’s Holy Mountain” stretch to the east over a submerged Westport. Though beautiful, the mountain was a lonely place then and prudence intervened. I set off down the steep track, which seemed at first to drop precipitously into the sea of cloud, passing through its 100m thick zone of eerie blue/grey diffused light.

Then I was below the cloud, surprised by the brightness of the orange lights of Murrisk car park in the gloom below. Looking back as I changed out of my boots the mountain did not look inviting, girdled at about 500m in thick cloud. There was no hint that, away up there the stars were coming out, their faint ghostly light around the chapel and on the floor of the sea of cloud above me!