On Reek Sunday, take a moment to think about our impact on the mountains as well as their impact on us, writes John O'Dwyer
The High Road to Redemption on the Reek Mountains is deeply alluring. Great rocky spires thrusting heavenward, past abodes of solitary saints and distant deities tempting us with spiritual uplift and regal views for those accepting the implied "climb if you dare" challenge.
This explains why, starting at dawn tomorrow, thousands of people will set out seeking redemption - many in bare feet risking injury or worse - on a tough spiritual journey to the summit of our holy mountain.
Certainly it is true that since time immemorial mountains have been venerated as special places. Down the ages we have loaded them with legend and credited them with powers of spirituality and magic. It's the enigmatic quality of high places, their prominence and permanence against our transience and triviality that draws us to them. To the people of Tibet, Everest is the "mother goddess of the Universe". To aboriginal Australians, Ayers Rock is sacred, while the Alpenglow from the Swiss Mountains was believed to reflect the treasures of the earth.
The poet Wordsworth ascended Snowdon by night and found the experience transcended "the imperfect offices of prayer and praise" and became an emblem feeding upon infinity.
Small wonder then that salient Irish peaks such as Gullion, Slievenamon, The Paps and Croagh Patrick have also been interwoven with the heroic myths and spiritual beliefs used to bond communities since before the arrival of Christianity. Reek Sunday is just the best-known example of several pre-Christian, pattern-day climbs, which have become incorporated into the Christian calendar and are still taking place on mountains across Ireland.
However, if climbers come to the Reek, or indeed any other Irish mountain, with dreamy visions informed by romantic poets and painters they are bound for disappointment. Mostly, it is not the weather or the unforgiving terrain that spoils the romance but the work of man. You see, wherever you wander on the Irish hills you'll come across the monuments of our ancestors. From a distance, Croagh Patrick seems a perfect, unspoiled quartzite cone.
Come closer, however, and the magic is initially lessened. Heading up the Reek this weekend pilgrims will encounter statues, paths, prayer beds, cairns, archaeological remains, toilet blocks and hopefully at the end of their penitential trek the 100-year summit church, incongruously positioned on its bouldery throne. Indeed, it is these signs and messages - many from our pagan past - that are part of the magnetic power bringing us back to the Reek generation after generation.
Materialism may squat immovably at the core of modern life, but the multitudes following a 5,000-year tradition tomorrow are the living proof of a continuing desire for higher meaning which material wealth leaves unsatisfied.
But would Croagh Patrick be in some way better if it had been preserved from the multitudes as a pristine mountain pyramid? Certainly not. Mountains are at their best when they contribute to human endeavour. A ruined croft in a high place tells the story of such contribution - a sheep farm on a mountainside affirms the continued importance of this contribution. The burial cairns, the pilgrim paths, the stone walls, the religious artifacts are not incongruous intrusions, but memorials to how we have used our mountains. Economically, spiritually or politically - depending on contemporary need - the powerful symbolism of the highest place has been exploited to buttress and bind communities.
But then a troublesome question arises. Why support conservation, if the ugly deflector masts of today will transform with time to communicational swans, providing future fascination for generations unborn? The difference lies with degree. Past human influence altered but did not threaten the delicate upland eco-system. Our forefathers struggled heroically to slightly tame our mountains and what little they achieved was hard won.
With much less effort we have, today, the power to irreversibly alter the balance of nature.
With intensive grazing, barbed-wire fences and scarring roadways, we can transform the diverse mountain meadows - presently exuberant with natural flowers - into the green deserts of monoculture. Untrammelled modern technology ranged against our mountains is no longer a fair struggle, it's a turkey shoot and at our ease we can eliminate much upland environment.
Reek Sunday offers a good excuse for many to tag a first summit. Of course, climbing uphill is an unaccustomed and singular struggle, no matter how we romanticise it, just as it was an unromantic but accustomed struggle for our forefathers.
Today, the value lies not in the summit gained, or even with the view - which considering Irish weather is always a bonus - but in the effort itself and our empathy with the surroundings as we ascend.
On the way to the summit pilgrims will gaze upon the monuments of past generations and hopefully be reminded that these interventions never aspired to improve on creation. The challenge today is to resist the understandable temptation to irrevocably change our mountain areas by forever compromising the uplands. Instead, we need to adopt a long-term sustainable approach aimed at supporting the type of healthy interaction between humans and hills, which occurs each year on the last Sunday of July.
John G O'Dwyer is a hill walker and mountain leader