have climbed Croagh Patrick. Once. In 2001, I think, or thereabouts. It took about three hours up and considerably less time down, partly because my knees had opinions about the descent that I couldn't ignore. It was a college weekend away...)

It's a remarkable experience. I won't pretend otherwise. Standing at the top of a mountain on the west coast of Ireland, with the islands of Clew Bay laid out below you, is genuinely moving - whether you're doing it for Patrick, for the pre-Christian tradition underneath Patrick, or simply because someone dared you.

I have not climbed it since. And I don't particularly plan to.

What I do now, in late July, is put flowers in the house for Garland Sunday - the last Sunday of July, which also goes by the name Reek Sunday in Mayo, where Croagh Patrick stands. The mountain climbing and the flower strewing are the two main traditions attached to this day across Ireland, documented in community after community in the Irish Folklore Collection at duchas.ie. Both of them appear to carry traces of something far older than Christianity. Possibly older than the named Irish deities we know as well.

I find this remarkable. That a Sunday in late July - unremarkable by modern standards, not a bank holiday, not a feast day in any mainstream sense - has been considered significant in Ireland for longer than anyone can fully trace. That my ancestors were doing something on this day. That I can do something small on this day and be, in some tiny way, continuous with them.

The flowers are enough. They're more than enough.

This week's post is about the opposite point on the wheel from Imbolc - what Lúnasa means, what Garland Sunday tells us about our ancestors' practice, and what's coming over the next few weeks as we move toward the 1st of August.

[Read it here]

Bríd libh

Órlagh

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