Go Walk: Maeve’s Cairn, Knocknarea, Co Sligo

As an exercise of the legs and lungs, it’s just a short steepish walk to Knocknarea’s summit cairn, known as Maeve’s Cairn; as an exercise of the imagination, it’s a journey into another world, one essentially unknown and unknowable to us.

That said, an obvious 1.2km path goes there from a spacious car park, with information panels aiding the imagination along the way.

The area of the Cúil Irra peninsula, which is dominated by Knocknarea, was of great religious significance to real farming people in very distant Irish pre-history. The most impressive monument, and intended to be so by its builders, is Maeve’s Cairn, a megalithic tomb, sitting atop this shapely limestone mountain.

This is almost certainly a chambered cairn, with perhaps the burnt remains of many important tribal persons lying protected and undisturbed deep within. In my view, it is a place to visit on a misty atmospheric day, when modern imagination-killers, like Strandhill’s airstrip and golf course, are hazed and blurred.

I went up there one May day when the lowering cloud squeezed the world into a few hundred vertical feet, and an on-off misty drizzle dampened the stones of Maeve’s Cairn. The massive dimensions of the tomb, or cairn, seen up close, stopped me in my tracks.

A remnant from another time and world, allowed into ours by its remote location and tough durability, it’s a place to linger and feel and imagine.

This I did for an hour or so, wandering the flat mountain top, walking prepared paths to outlier tombs and stones and visiting a probable cairn- supplying quarry pit. There may have been perhaps less peat and more karst limestone exposed 5,000 years ago, but otherwise this is the same place, largely unchanged from when the Shamans of successive religions and their followers incanted to their gods and spirits, in ancient pre-Celtic languages of which we now have no idea.

For us who think mostly in decades, the long sweep of time while countless short generations of these unknowable people inhabited the area and perceived a spirituality on this mountain, is hard for us to fathom. Yet these people and their contemporaries were, for most of us, our direct blood ancestors, at least in terms of maternal (mitochondrial) DNA. Although we know virtually nothing of them, no doubt they experienced the horrors of wars, failed harvests and famines, profound Shamanic disputations and upheavals, as well as the joy of children and of light and spring warmth returning.

All this happened in the midst of our own magical landscape of Sligo, their familiarity with its lakes, rivers, hills and coasts more deep-rooted and of a far greater longevity than ours, although even their place-names are now lost to us or hidden deep in the etymology of our Celtic language.

I came back to the car and car park, really glad I had diverted to that holy place on my way back to Dublin.