"All the Themes of Hagiography": An Turas Cholm Cille Revisited

The bell tower of the Church of Ireland hovered darkly as some thirty pilgrims gathered with hushed voices at the gravel lot outside the cemetery walls of Gleann Cholm Cille, a breac-Gaeltacht—that is, a partially Irish-speaking—village in County Donegal. It was nearing midnight, June 9, 2010, and the official performance of an Turas Cholm Cille, or "Colm Cille's Penitential Stations," reputedly the longest surviving pilgrimage in Ireland—and, covering a distance of three and a half miles, or five kilometers, also the longest walk of all Irish pilgrimages—was about to begin.¹

Historically, most pilgrims have undertaken the journey barefoot, but this year, everyone's feet were clad. Within the next four hours, those gathered would face what an early twentieth-century writer called "the calvary of the Turas."² In silence, they would stop at fifteen "stations" to circle, genuflect, pray individually and collectively, recite fifteen decades of the rosary, and outline the village's sacred contours in single file.

Those villagers who stayed secure at home peering from windows and doorways would observe the boundaries of their sacred world delineated by bodies moving through space, etched by the light and shadow of flickering lamps. The next day, the anniversary of the death of the founder saint, they would talk about the impressions made as we circled Saint Colm Cille's chair, where he had rested, his bed, where he had slept and where we had lain in imitation of him, and his well, where we had drunk and collected his healing water. The pilgrims would marvel at how we had crossed a dark and silent landscape to find cross-inscribed stone slabs that have stood for more than one thousand years.

I have consistently been one of those pilgrims. Gleann Cholm Cille is the site of my anthropological fieldwork to which, as a participant observer, I have returned frequently since the mid-1990s to study such matters as the revitalization of the Irish language, the discourse of tourism, the legacy of Father James McDyer's "Save the West" campaign, and, of particular interest, the annual performance of an Turas Cholm Cille. When the 1400th anniversary of the saint's death was commemorated in 1997, I presented my findings to the community by comparing an Turas Cholm Cille to other pilgrimages like Santiago de Compostela, Mecca, and Benares. This religious ritual continues to draw participants—usually numbering thirty to fifty each year—though there was a significant rise in participation in the anniversary year of 1997. The walk is too rigorous for the elderly; most of the pilgrims are middle-aged, though younger people do take part every year.

A number of scholars have written about pilgrimage in Ireland, approaching the subject from varied angles.³ The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner explore the penitential stations of Lough Derg for their elements of anti-structural communitas and their ability to free pilgrims from the confines of rigidity, hierarchy, rationality, and abstraction.⁴ Mary Lee Nolan, a comparative geographer, addresses the nontypical features of Irish pilgrimage in relationship to its Continental model where in the past, tombs of martyrs, saints' physical remains, and Marian devotions attracted worshippers. Nolan contends that in Ireland, the dedication to particularly local saints, resistance to British rule, and a shrine's remoteness have motivated Irish women and men to walk the stations. She eschews the Turners' ideas of "nuclear paradigms"—that is, patterns of pilgrimage upon which adaptations were grafted—and insists that more than a third of Ireland's sacred sites were "pagan Celtic religious centers."⁵

Folklore scholars offer yet another set of perspectives on Irish pilgrimage. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin's study of holy wells focuses on tradition and the Irish pilgrims' willingness to endure pain, travel great distances for cures, and engage in faction fighting. He discusses the revival of well worship in the nineteenth century, when excesses had been eliminated and discourses of cultural nationalism had moved center stage, and concludes by calling for more ethnographies on pilgrimage and more scholarship oriented to "traditions of the...