Patrick and Corra on the Holy Mountain

Key takeaways: Croagh Patrick’s legend is built in layers; the mountain was sacred for millennia before Patrick, as the Boheh Stone’s rolling-sun alignment and the Bronze Age summit enclosure show; the seventh-century account gives Patrick forty days of fasting and troublesome birds, the ninth-century one adds demonic flocks and the flung bell; the she-demon Corra and her serpent-banishment are later folklore, not medieval text; and the Reek Sunday climb each July continues what is very likely a pre-Christian harvest assembly.

The mountain before Patrick

The saint is the most recent arrival in the story of this mountain.

Long before anyone called it Croagh Patrick, the conical quartzite peak above Clew Bay bore the name Cruachán Aigle, the Stack of the Eagle (the etymology is debated). Rising 764 metres above the village of Murrisk and the drowned drumlins of Clew Bay, visible from Westport and far into the Atlantic, the mountain commanded the western horizon of Connacht.

Archaeology shows organised human activity here from at least the Neolithic. Archaeologist Christiaan Corlett writes that the prehistoric monuments surrounding and oriented towards the mountain suggest it “has been a local spiritual inspiration since at least the Neolithic, and during the Bronze Age became the focus of an extensive ritual landscape.” Gerry Walsh’s licensed excavation at the summit in 1994 uncovered an early Christian dry-stone oratory; a subsequent survey located the remains of a Bronze Age enclosure or hill-fort rampart encircling the summit itself, with dozens of circular hut-foundations abutting it. The present 1905 chapel sits within the collapsed walls of this prehistoric enclosure. Three large cairns, Reilig Mhuire (Mary’s Graveyard) in the Christian tradition, are most likely Bronze Age burial cairns now integrated into the pilgrimage stations.

A short distance east lies the Boheh Stone: a natural outcrop covered in more than 260 Neolithic petroglyphs, cup-and-ring marks and keyhole motifs, carved around 3800 BC, one of the finest pieces of Neolithic rock art in Ireland and one of only two in Connacht. Later Christianised as St Patrick’s Chair and made a waypoint on Tóchar Phádraig, its pre-Christian significance dominates: twice yearly, around 18 April and 24 August, an observer at the Boheh Stone watches the setting sun touch Croagh Patrick’s summit and then appear to roll down the mountain’s northern shoulder. This “rolling sun” phenomenon, rediscovered between 1987 and 1992 by Gerry Bracken, was almost certainly why this stone was chosen for carving; the two dates bracket the agricultural calendar with solar precision. People stood at this stone and watched the sun roll down the mountain thousands of years before Patrick climbed it.

Máire MacNeill’s study The Festival of Lughnasa (1962) documented more than seventy hills and waterside sites across Ireland used for the Lughnasadh harvest assembly, held at or around the last Sunday of July. MacNeill argued that Croagh Patrick was among the sites where a pre-Christian assembly survived into the Christian era under the cover of pilgrimage, the annual climb “a Christianization of part of the Lughnasa festival.” The character of Lughnasadh gatherings, hillside assembly, festivity, bilberry-picking, matchmaking, matches what historical sources record for Reek Sunday. The connection to Lugh, harvest deity of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and to Crom Dubh, an agricultural figure also associated with this mountain, is a widely accepted scholarly inference from comparative mythology rather than something stated in any single medieval text.

Forty days on the summit

The earliest written account comes from Tírechán, a seventh-century bishop from north Connacht (the Killala Bay area of Mayo). His Collectanea, written around 688-693 and preserved uniquely in the Book of Armagh, records the episode with brevity. In Ludwig Bieler’s translation: “And Patrick proceeded to Mons Aiglí, intending to fast there for forty days and forty nights, following the example of Moses, Elias, and Christ… stayed there forty days and forty nights, and birds were troublesome to him and he could not see the face of sky and land and sea…”

Tírechán does not call the birds demonic. The theological weight falls on vision: God commanded all the holy men of Ireland, past, present, and future, to climb the mountain, so that Patrick might “see the fruit of his labours,” the choir of all the saints of the Irish coming to visit their father. The fast ends in Patrick’s blessing of the Irish people.

The Bethu Phátraic (Tripartite Life of St Patrick), a ninth-century Old Irish hagiography edited and translated by Whitley Stokes in 1887, transforms this sparse account dramatically. The mountain is “filled with black birds, so that he knew not heaven nor earth”, implicitly demonic, for after their rout “no demon came to the land of Erin” for seven years, seven months, seven days and seven nights. Patrick sings maledictive psalms at them, then strikes his bell at them and finally flings it, “so that its gap broke out of it”, the bell known thereafter as Brigit’s Gapling (Bernán Brigte). The medieval text gives only the bell’s name; the tradition that Brigid gave Patrick the bell, and its identification with the Black Bell relic, are later accretions. Patrick weeps until face and chasuble are wet; the angel then consoles him, cleanses the chasuble, and brings white birds to sing sweet melodies around the Rick. There follows the famous bargaining: boon after boon for the men of Ireland, the angel each time saying “and now get thee gone from the Rick,” Patrick each time refusing, “I will not get me gone, since I have been tormented, till I am blessed”, until at last even his demand to judge the men of Ireland himself at Doomsday is granted by the Lord.

The bell was broken. The boons were granted.

The Bethu Phátraic thus adds to Tírechán: the birds’ demonic character, the bell as weapon and its breaking, the white-bird consolation, and the bargaining for boons. One negative finding matters for everything that follows: the hollow Log na nDeamhan is not named in the Tripartite Life. The medieval text says only that the birds were routed; the placename, and the casting of the demons into the hollow, belong to the later folklore layer.

Corra and Lough na Corra

The most vivid element of the popular legend, the serpent she-demon Corra banished from the summit, does not appear in Tírechán or in the Bethu Phátraic. Her name occurs nowhere in either text, and no she-demon, serpent, or lake-monster figures in their Croagh Patrick episodes. The Corra material is folklore recorded from the nineteenth century onward, in Ordnance Survey-era and antiquarian accounts of Mayo and in the 1937-38 Schools’ Folklore Collection.

In this tradition Patrick is tormented not only by demonic birds but by a she-demon named Corra or Caoirthineach (also written Caorthannach; the names appear interchangeably in different retellings, and the relationship between them is not resolved in the sources). She is a serpentine female being, a monstrous spirit of the pre-Christian order, sometimes called the mother of the demon-birds. When Patrick rings his bell and drives the flock into the hollow called Log na nDeamhan, Corra flees to Lough na Corra, a lake south of the mountain, into which she plunges. The lake’s name preserves her memory.

The 1937-38 Schools’ Folklore Collection from Mayo schools describes serpents rising from “log na Niúin,” Patrick firing his bell at them and driving them into a lake called Loch na corraigh, and a man later resting by this lake who saw a small woman appear on a rock, change into a serpent, and dive into the water; water-horses are said to haunt the place still.

A separate tradition places the defeat of Caorthannach (Caoránach) at Lough Derg, County Donegal, the site of St Patrick’s Purgatory. There Caorthannach is a great serpent associated with fire and poison, sometimes called “the mother of the devil”; Patrick pursues her across Ireland and overcomes her at Lough Derg, whose waters turn red from her blood (hence Loch Dearg). The Mayo schools folklore connects the two: “when St. Patrick banished the serpents from Croagh they fled into Lough Derg in Donegal.” This conflation is a secondary development in oral tradition, not an early textual position. Caorthannach properly belongs to the Lough Derg complex; Corra belongs to the Croagh Patrick and Lough na Corra complex.

In more speculative modern readings, not found in any medieval text, Corra has been interpreted as a survival of a pre-Christian serpent-goddess dispossessed by Christianity. That is modern mythological reconstruction. What can be confirmed is that her name is preserved in the landscape: Lough na Corra below the mountain is a real place.

Reek Sunday

The pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick is among the oldest continuously observed Christian observances in Ireland. The Annals of Ulster entry for 1113 AD records thirty pilgrims killed by lightning on the summit. Jocelyn’s twelfth-century Life of St Patrick notes that “many are accustomed to spend the night awake and fasting on the mount.” In 1432, Pope Eugene IV issued an indulgence to penitents visiting the summit chapel on the last Sunday of July, the papal confirmation of the feast day that survives as Reek Sunday.

Reek Sunday, Domhnach na Cruaiche, the last Sunday of July, draws tens of thousands annually. Masses are said at the summit chapel (built 1905, replacing structures recorded from at least 824 AD; the oratory uncovered in 1994 was radiocarbon-dated to 430-890 AD). The pilgrimage stations are prayers performed while walking sunwise around the Leaba Phádraig (Patrick’s Bed), the three cairns of Reilig Mhuire, and the summit chapel. Some pilgrims still climb barefoot on the sharp quartzite scree.

Until 1970, pilgrims traditionally climbed after sunset, possibly a descendant of the prehistoric practice of watching the Boheh Stone’s rolling sun at dusk before a night ascent. The pilgrimage’s end-of-July timing precisely overlaps the Lughnasadh calendar MacNeill documented, and the pattern of hillside assembly, ritual circuits around ancient cairns, and communal festivity corresponds closely to the Lughnasadh customs she recorded across Ireland.

Tóchar Phádraig (Patrick’s Causeway) runs 30-35 kilometres from Ballintubber Abbey to the mountain’s base along the line of a pre-Christian chariot road, almost certainly the ancient route from Cruachan (Rathcroghan, seat of the Kings of Connacht) to Cruachán Aigle, a route dating back approximately 1,500 years. It passes the Boheh Stone, integrating the Neolithic solar monument into the Christian journey. The route has been revived and waymarked, and the full walk takes about ten hours on foot.

What pilgrims do on Reek Sunday, circling the ancient cairns sunwise, looking out over Clew Bay’s drowned drumlins, climbing barefoot or shod through the quartzite scree, holds every layer traced in this entry: the Neolithic cosmology of the Boheh Stone and hilltop enclosure; the Lughnasadh harvest assembly Christianised into pilgrimage; Tírechán’s seventh-century account of forty days and troublesome birds; the ninth-century elaboration of demonic flock and the flung, broken bell; and the post-medieval folk layer of the she-demon Corra, the hollow Log na nDeamhan, and Lough na Corra. The serpent legend is the newest layer, the most often told and the least attested in the oldest sources, and perhaps the most vivid, because it gives the mountain’s older, darker power a name and a face.

The lake is still below the mountain, and the name is still on it.