First steps to Clare pilgrimage

The first steps are being taken to develop a Camino-style pilgrimage through County Clare, it has emerged. A small group is carrying out research into the county’s monastic heritage and the best routes for the proposed walks.

“The whole idea is to get people walking on our rural walkways and into the mountains and along the coast of Clare for exercise and inspiration and small teams are, at the moment, building up information to create new maps for walkers. This information will bring together some of the old pilgrimage routes that were around at the time of Fachtnan,” explained Canon Bob Hanna.
The Camino de Santiago de Compostela, also known in English as The Way of St James, attracted more than a quarter of a million tourists to Northern Spain last year.
Earlier this week, 27 members of the Ennis Probus Club, one of two senior Rotarian groups in the county, went on a Camino, or pilgrimage, into their Celtic past at Kilfenora. Burren activist and Christian thinker Brian Mooney led the group on a motor tour of ancient sites around Kilfenora, starting with an introductory talk about St Fachtnan in the 11th century cathedral church named after the monk who made his own migration from Rosscarberry in West Cork to settle in Kilfenora in the sixth century, building up a monastery as the centre of spiritual life there. Leaving the village of the High Crosses, Mr Mooney gave the group an introduction to the site of the O’Davoren law school or Brehon law centre founded in the 1500s and active until Cromwellian times. Noughaval Church and Burren Beo farm centre at Carron were also stopping-off points. Canon Bob Hanna led a short Celtic devotion in St Fachtnan’s prior to the Probus round tour.
“Mr Mooney portrayed the uniqueness of Clare’s landscape and history, especially the spiritual element, where the Celtic sense of immanence permeates the best of religion and human activity even today,” reflected Canon Hanna.
A founding member of the Burren Action Group and Kilfenora Interpretive Centre, Mr Mooney is now leading a team effort intent on mapping out spiritual sites of interest for walkers and cyclists. He hopes to see Clare’s uniquely isolated landscape become a popular place for Celtic pilgrimage.
“It is difficult to explain but it is very possible to live in Clare and visit the Burren and yet not appreciate the background to its spiritual history as well as its archaeology and geology. We focussed on the life of Fachtnan or Fachtna, who made his own journey from Cork, a part of that type of asceticism which portrayed the search by the early Celts to know God,” Canon Hanna continued.
This type of tour could be a way for people to reconnect with their own spirituality, he claimed.
“This is the incentive for us to try to open up the highways of Clare’s landscape and open up those spiritual highways, because the early Celts had such a holistic view of themselves as being part of the everything around them. They loved nature, they felt part of natural life, which is not something that everybody feels today.
“They brought that real sense of humanism with them into Europe when it was so necessary. Their God was somebody who was involved with them in everyday life. Not a distant transcendent God, as was the case with, for example, the Greek culture and other pagan cultures.
“We need a religion of warmth and hope today and the converted Christian druids had something very special. This walk reintroduces people to this idea,” Canon Hanna concluded.