Seven Easters
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In the sixties, from the B&B in Ballydavid you could see Brandon, when the cloud allowed. That summer, most summers in fact, allowed it rarely.
I had seen pictures of Table Mountain in Cape Town and from the right angle I thought Brandon looked a little like it. The cloud made it hard to be sure.
The AA Gazetteer put Brendan the Navigator on its summit, looking west, before he went down to the sea and sailed a currach to America, centuries before Vespucci. I took that as settled.
I was seven or eight. I decided one day I would stand where he had stood and see what he had seen.
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The voyage was written down by monks some centuries after Brendan died, as the Navigatio Sancti Brendani. By its account he was already an abbot, father to nearly three thousand monks. He chose fourteen of them and went to sea.
The voyage does not go in a straight line. They sail for seven years, and each Easter they come back to the same places. One year they land on a bare black island and light a fire to cook. The island moves. It is a great fish, Jasconius. They return to its back every Easter after that and say Mass on it. Only at the end of the seventh year are they let reach the land they set out for.
In 1976 Tim Severin, who had read geography at Oxford and could have spent his life writing about other men’s voyages, built a boat of ash frames and ox hide and sailed it out of Brandon Creek, to see whether it could be done. He reached Newfoundland the following summer.
It could.
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My own first attempt was in January 1982, with my then girlfriend, who had come from Japan and had never stood on an Irish mountain. It had snowed, unusually, down to about two hundred metres.
We took the Saints’ Road; the crosses marking the stations came some years later.
We were well supplied with enthusiasm and poorly supplied with everything else: no map, the wrong clothes, the wrong boots, nothing to eat or drink. Where the path steepens, we stopped.
It was not a hard decision.
We went down to Kruger’s in Dún Chaoin, the air thick with cigarettes and turf smoke, and drank hot whiskies. I gave her an introductory course in the myths and legends of Ireland. It was imperfect. She gave me some of Japan’s in return, and we found more in common between them than either of us expected.
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Decades later, in winter, I tried again, with friends. This time the Pilgrim’s Path, up past the Paternoster Lakes, strung below the mountain like beads on a rosary. The mist came down and a gale came with it.
On Faha Ridge we agreed, without much argument, that Brandon could wait. A better mountaineer would have been on top by noon.
Dick Mac’s this time. Hot whiskies again, then pints, and live covers of Planxty, Moving Hearts, Scullion and the Wolfe Tones. Then Christy Moore’s St Brendan’s Voyage, and the tales got taller than the first time.
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In between, and since, the boat out to the Blaskets, in every kind of sea, some of it benign and some of it not. The Green Road to the far end of the Great Blasket and back. Minkes, some days. A humpback more than once, and fin whales. Basking sharks often. One summer’s day there were so many minkes that I tired of them.
I have never seen an orca off Dingle. I am told they come.
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The monks in the Navigatio never complain about the fish. They land on it every Easter as if for the first time, light no fire, say Mass, and push off again.
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Two days after a wedding in Dingle this month, my wife and I started up the Saints’ Road from near Brandon Creek, where Brendan put out to sea and Severin put out after him. The weather could not have been better: a little over freezing at the start, warming as we climbed, not a breath of wind, not a cloud. We came to the point where the path steepens, where I had stopped in 1982.
We kept going.
We were not the fastest, nor the slowest.
In a little over two hours we reached the fourteenth cross and the remains of Brendan’s oratory.
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Brandon is 952 metres high. From the top we could see the Three Sisters, Smerwick Harbour and Wine Strand, and beyond them the Blaskets and the Skelligs. To the east, Castlegregory and the Maharees. To the north, and rarely, the Aran Islands.
I do not know what Brendan saw from up there, or whether he went up at all.
His monks needed seven Easters. I needed sixty summers.
I am told the orcas come more often now.
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29 October 2026
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© 2026 Paul Duggan
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104