Writer Chet Raymo has been climbing Kerry's Mount Brandon for 30 years. He talks mythology, cosmology and etymology with Arminta Wallace in Dingle.
The invitation was irresistible. "Climb Mount Brandon", said the e-mail, "in the company of a scientist and writer who has been to the top of Ireland's second-highest mountain more than 100 times, and has written a book which weaves together myth and science, folklore and natural history, spiritual and physical geographies in a rich celebration of ..." And so on. Oh, yes: in the virtual world, the plan had an enticing sheen.
The real world, alas, has no respect for even the best-laid plans. We leave Dublin on an unremarkable autumn afternoon, and wake up in Ballyferriter's brand-new and strikingly elegant Óstán Cheann Sibéal to find the wind howling around outside like a hammy actor intent on a starring role as an evil emperor in a Tolkien movie. The Connor Pass is being scoured by horizontal showers of hailstones. By the time we get to the townland of Faha, at the foot of Mount Brandon, it's obvious that on this particular day the 3,127-foot summit is going to stay tantalisingly out of our reach.
But maybe we could make it as far as the Iron Age site of Binn na Port, which Chet Raymo describes in his book, Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain, as "a jutting promontory of Mount Brandon, like a fist shaken at the world ... a place as remote as any on the peninsula - gloomy, cloud-wrapped, outside of time"? We don't mind getting wet, we plead. We'll put on extra jumpers. Raymo, however, shakes his head and points to a large sign at the edge of the car park.
Erected by the Kerry Mountaineering Club, it notes - among other things - that "a breeze here can be a strong wind up there". Before we have even lurched as far as the Marian shrine where pious pilgrims say a prayer before embarking on their ascent, we have to admit that what we are struggling against is no breeze. Up at Binn na Port, Raymo reckons, the wind today would be getting on for 60 miles per hour. And he should know. He has been climbing Brandon for more than 30 years. He suggests we abandon the mountain altogether and settle for a brief scramble to a nearby corrie by the name of Pedlar's Lake.
Piece of cake, huh? We find ourselves teetering up a short but dizzyingly steep incline, frozen fingers clinging to wet rock. Raymo has scooted nimbly to the top and is hunkered over a large, flat lump of stone, stroking its surface as lovingly as if it were a cat basking in sunshine.
"See these striations here?" he yells through the gale. "See how they're all running in the same direction? Those are chatter marks. It's not the ice itself that scrapes the rock - you could scrub this with an ice cube for 100 years and never make any impression at all. But if you used an ice cube with little bits of gravel frozen into the bottom of it, well ..." This, he tells us, is where 19th-century geologists first recognised the awesome power of living glaciers. As he talks about Louis Agassiz and glacial moraines and the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, we begin to understand just what we're missing by not climbing the mountain in the company of this particular scientist and writer.
Happily, there's still the book. As its sub-title suggests, it is itself a sort of pilgrimage to Brandon - but a leisurely one, with lots of time for excursions into mythology, cosmology and etymology. Open it at random and you'll encounter the Gulf Stream, golden saxifrage and Gerald of Wales. Saint Brendan the Navigator rubs shoulders with the men from the Ordnance Survey. The dashing Celtic god Lug battles it out with his arch-rival Chrom Dubh. There are quotes from Lord Byron and Plutarch and Thomas Merton; there's a paragraph about apple trees which points out in passing that the legendary island west of Ireland, Eamhain Abhlach (Land of Apples), is pretty much the same, linguistically, as Arthur's mystical kingdom of Avalon. And if you want to know how scientists have calculated that the Atlantic Ocean is getting wider at the rate of an inch a year, you can read all about a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
Chet Raymo first arrived in Dingle with his family on a year-long sabbatical from his teaching job in Stonehill College, Massachusetts. Why Dingle? He shrugs. "We more or less stuck a pin in a map of Europe," he admits.
His name is of French-Canadian origin - "Rameau, as in the composer" - but mutated to "Raymo" when his ancestors emigrated to Tennessee. His weekly column, "Science Musings", ran for 20 years in the Boston Globe, and has now - with a little hi-tech help from his son, Tom - switched to cyberspace at www.sciencemusings.com. He has produced a string of non-fiction books on astronomy, science and the natural world as well as a trio of novels, including The Dork of Cork, source of the film Frankie Starlight. His latest novel, Valentine, a love story set in the Rome of the gladiators, will be published by Brandon Press in January.
What all Chet Raymo's books have in common is a fascination with the fault-line between the scientific and the spiritual. The old theologies, he believes, can't cope with our new knowledge of the cosmos; on the other hand, scientific knowledge alone is not enough to satisfy the human demand for a bigger picture. Climbing Brandon takes as its starting-point the spirituality forged in Ireland when Mediterranean Christianity collided with Celtic nature worship, and argues that certain elements of that world-view could prove uncommonly useful in the 21st century.
Raymo has no starry-eyed illusions of the "Celtic-Schmeltic" kind, and is quick to acknowledge his debt to Irish writers who have, in recent years, looked closely at the pros and cons of Celtic spirituality. "I'm a pretty sceptical guy from a science background, but there's something about this approach to the world that I find very moving," he says. "It's to do with celebration, awe, a sense that the natural world is shot through with mystery in ways that even our sophisticated science cannot begin to comprehend."
Awe at the natural world, of course, is something the Dingle Peninsula does supremely well. When we leave the Connor Pass we're silenced by the sight of a rainbow glowing in the sky - below us. At Clogher Head, surf pours on to the beach from a cauldron of seething turquoise. Up at Pedlar's Lake, the light on the water is a glossy blue-black. Instinctively, I take a step toward it: and am, quite literally, blown away. Quick as a flash Raymo has a hold of my elbow. The wind, he says, is now gusting at some 45 miles per hour. Carefully, we turn to look across the valley at a lake on one of the lower flanks of the elusive Brandon. It appears to be on fire. "My God," Raymo declares. "I've never seen anything like that."
In 30 years on the mountain? We all blink and look again. Maybe it is on fire. Up here, anything appears to be possible. Raymo chuckles. What is hovering high above the surface of the lough is not smoke, but froth churned up by the wind. "If we had a whole day, and a packed lunch, and the weather was reasonable," says the scientist and writer, "I could show you places that would make your hair stand on end."
Climbing Brandon: Science and Faith on Ireland's Holy Mountain by Chet Raymo is published by Brandon Books at €13.99