You would see a long line of them trudging silently through the snow in the morning, like spectres from some long-forgotten famine work scheme. Except that they were dressed in the height of crusty chic, and every now and then someone struck up Jingle Bells on the tin whistle.
They were the undaunted students of the Frankie Kennedy Winter School, which staggered through the thickest snow fall remembered in the area in decades and ended with the full thaw on Tuesday. A lot of people advised its organiser, Gearoid O Maonaigh, to cancel, but he argued that he could not. Not as the dedicated worshippers at the shrine of Irish traditional music converged on Ionad Cois Locha, the small, beautiful venue beside the lake at the foot of Errigal Mountain.
A man from Tokyo started by taking a train to Sligo. When he discovered there was no public transport to Donegal, he took the train back to Dublin and headed to Belfast. There his trail goes dead, until he hired a car in Derry and crept towards Dunlewey. A man from New Zealand spent the guts of two days in Letterkenny sending distress signals to Ionad Cois Locha, until he found a taxi-man willing to take him there over the back roads. A family from Cork spent two days on the road.
There were many names pulled from the original line-up for the concerts: Paul Brady could not make it, for example, and nor did Steve Cooney. But somehow, the show went on: fiddler Paddy Glackin had a surprise accompanist in Donal Lunny on bouzouki and bodhran - Lunny spent two days in Dublin airport trying to get to Carrickfin. Singer Liam O Maonlai failed in his attempt to get a bodhran-player up from the audience, and was content to play all the instruments on the stage himself.
But then there has always been an element of pilgrimage about the Frankie Kennedy Winter School. Partly, it is because the school began seven years ago as a kind of constructive wake for Altan's muchloved flute-player, who died at the age of 38.
Liam O Maonlai first came to the school the year Frankie Kennedy died. He was one of the astonishing array of musicians who arrived that year to play themselves out of their misery at the death of Kennedy, and also out of their own private miseries. O Maonlai's father had recently died and he had called the activities of his band, the Hot House Flowers, to a close for a year: "I wasn't thriving in it, I was surviving in it. . . I knew he was with me when I asked for that year."
O Maonlai's journey is the kind which the Frankie Kennedy school easily facilitates; musicians play there with and for musicians, because it is what they love doing. At the time of the first school, says O Maonlai, "I was starting to get an idea of who I was. I wasn't able to do it within the confines of the band regime. The music business was not friendly to my idea of being alive. I feel like now I actually am growing. I have a chance to look at how I want to live my life and to present music."
How? "I like playing with time. I like human frailty. I feel a crowd of people can be satisfied without having external equipment, just the people in that room or that field. I am trying to work out, as a musician, what is my part in the big picture? What can musicians achieve as part of the social structure?"
Sitting behind stage in his purple and pink tea-cosy hat, he seems to see the musician's role as that of a kind of shaman, and he says he takes "a lot of inspiration from aboriginal culture". Had Steve Cooney made it, they would have been a striking pair: Cooney's take on the aboriginal culture of his native Australia is unique - and his tea-cosies are famous. Cooney got a Brigidine nun in Kildare to bless O Maonlai's hands to play the harp a couple of months ago, and his astonishing musical versatility means he is already plucking away, the thinking woman's Bunratty maiden. As well as a new Hot House Flowers album, he is working with London-based producer John Reynolds on an album of traditional songs.
He tells me about Seoladh na ngamhna, the seannos song he has performed during the concert, and adds: "I'm sure there were ceremonial uses for these songs, to honour hills and honour animals and sing the animals, as there are in cultures which are still operating in a non-wasteful way."
It is hard, he says, for the "English mind" to understand this - "the mind which thinks through English". He speaks of Gaeltacht culture, and specifically that of Dun Chaoin in Kerry, which has had the most impact on him: "Every field, every rock, even the rocks underneath the sea have names. The place is just shaking with mystery." Is he not romanticising shamelessly? "I think you can't romanticise enough," he says.
Though his mother's family is from Connemara, this love of the Kerry Gaeltacht came to him through his father. They had their differences, he says, but Dun Chaoin was common ground between them as young Liam grew up in Cabinteely. It was in Kerry that he learned the power of traditional singing; he describes the effect of the Irish and English version of Carrickfergus which is one of his party pieces: "When I sing a song like that, I'm back in Dun Chaoin with [the singer] Tomas O Cinneide, and my father's there. It's two in the morning, and everyone is stilled by a voice with no microphone. There's peace in it. It's not joy, it's not euphoria, it's feeling."
O Maonlai's background in Irish traditional culture did not come to him by chance - it was chosen for him in 1960s Dublin, principally by his father. It was partly shaped by the career of another man who also chose his background in Irish traditional culture: Sean O Riada. Even now, O Maonlai says: "O Riada's the main man. I guess he travelled the same road as my father and found the same networks of consciousness and said, `Dublin, you've got to hear this'."
O Maonlai's father grew up in Cork, but "an tAthair Tadg", a priest at his school, was sending busloads of children off to the Kerry Gaeltacht to learn Irish: "There he found people who made boats, sang, wrote poetry, fished, built houses and also philosophised, theorised. There was the atmosphere of an unbroken language." It was a rebellious move, but his own father, Liam's grandfather, had been rebellious too: "He was in Wormwood Scrubs prison for two years, just for defending the land, really. Apparently his arrest in Midleton was something to be witnessed. He didn't go into the truck until the very last minute. He paced up and down with his hands behind his back and the soldiers could do nothing." He only heard the story recently: "My father turned his back a little bit. The stories weren't being told."
In fairness to O Maonlai, though he also may have "turned his back" on his father at times, he never gave into cynicism about Irish traditional culture, which would have been an easy move for the young man with tousled blonde hair Dubliners may recall busking with the Benzini Brothers. I remember, for example, as they busked at a Dublin Street Carnival in the early 1980s, a woman threw a red bra at him from a top window in Grafton Street. "I think I've always worn my tradition on my sleeve," he says. "Now I'm putting out what has inspired me over time, revealing it." He admits that he is lazy and has work to do to find new songs - he tends to rely on his show-stoppers, like The Lakes of Ponchartrain.
In the end, he is not looking for purity, however: "If I can feel something in the way someone sings something, it could be Iggy Pop." It is this search for feeling in music which inspires so many to make the trip to the foot of the mountain for New Year: "Frankie's spirit is always here," said Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh during their boisterous New Year's Day gig, before inviting Kennedy's mother Agnes up on stage to sing Crazy.
It is a place where O Maonlai's take on music means something: "Music is the place in between worlds, where you get to see things in a different light."
