The Comeragh Mountains in Waterford form a distinctive region, richly endowed in environment, history and culture, but the area still struggles for the kind of recognition that we grant almost automatically to Connemara, Killarney, and Glendalough.
The three-year-old Comeraghs Wild festival attempts to put this right in an enterprise that is both exciting and decidedly tricky: the celebration of both natural and cultural heritage in the same programme.
No event expresses this double aspiration as daringly as the Harvest Walk and Play.
This combines a quite demanding hike up the rocky slopes of Coumshingaun mountain, and a drama based on local history presented outdoors after darkness falls in the huge natural amphitheatre of the coum.
The play is followed by a torchlight descent or, for the more adventurous, dinner and overnight camping in this spectacular place.
Last weekend, some 300 people (and a couple of dogs, of which more later) departed Kilclooney Woods at 7pm. We soon found ourselves out in the open on a steep, often barely visible trail. We made our way through a vast scattering of rocks deposited many millennia ago by a retreating glacier, some hardly the size of your fist, others as big as houses.
It was evident that more than a few of the participants had not been on a hike like this for a long time, if ever. One man who experienced leg pains wisely retreated to the car park early on, accompanied by a guide from MountainZone, the local hill-walking tours company in charge of the walk.
Moving around a blind ridge, the grandeur of the coum, rising 300m – higher than the Cliffs of Moher – on three sides of a large corrie lake, suddenly becomes apparent. Coumshingaun is widely regarded as the largest and most dramatic formation of its type in the country, and it’s hard to argue with that.
We had been heartened by a promise of tea when we arrived at the campsite, still quite a long step below the lakeside where the play would be performed. But tea did not materialise. This was a small enough glitch, but one that registers after a 40-minute ascent and before a 40-minute performance in dropping temperatures.
It’s a tribute to the magnificence of the setting that people accepted the situation in good humour, and continued to the play scene, though finding our footing with rather more trepidation in the fading light.
Presenting a play in such an isolated setting is so brave that it borders on folly. So many things can go wrong, starting with the weather, but it was kind to us, though overcast.
However, word of a 30-minute delay made hearts sink, and quickly became a rumour that “they are still rehearsing”. Not promising.
I learned later that the sole attempt at on-site rehearsal the previous night had been abandoned for technical reasons. This made the quality of what followed all the more remarkable.
The delay suddenly evaporated and we were asked take our seats on rocks and heather surrounding a hollow by the lake, where the story of Crotty the Robber, a new play by local woman Martina Collender, rapidly unfolded.
William Crotty had used a cave in this very coum as a base for robbing nearby wealthy families in the 18th century. Whether he was a straightforward criminal and murderer, or a “social brigand” righting the injustices of colonial landlordism, remains controversial.
The recent debates around Thomas Kent, the nationalist executed in 1916 for the killing of an RIC sergeant, who had received a State funeral on the afternoon we watched this production, made the play seem curiously topical.
Chilling
Collender tells the story through three characters, Crotty himself (Brian Coady), his wife Mary (Anna Jordan), and his closest comrade, and nemesis, David Norris (Joe Meagher). Given the constraints of the venue, Collender was probably wise to make the format mostly a series of declamatory vignettes, with very basic illumination.
It seemed a pity, though, that neither she nor director Liam Meagher made any attempt to utilise the potentially very evocative background.
Even a silhouette of Redcoats on the ridge, or a robber band with torches moving across the landscape, could have added a new dimension.
But judicious use of the Gloaming song Samradh Samradh made a very powerful and appropriately minimal soundtrack.
The script was remarkably effective at conveying the tensions between Crotty’s view of himself as the people’s champion, Norris’s growing conviction that his friend is nothing but a thief with delusions of grandeur and Mary’s passionate desperation as their three lives unravel.
The moment when her lament literally sets the darkness echoing around the lake is chilling; especially as we know she will drown herself in a nearby corrie, which still bears her name, after Crotty is hanged.
All three actors were admirably successful in projecting to a scattered crowd in darkness, and in holding its attention firmly despite the deepening cold – and the occasional yapping of the aforementioned dogs. Real tension was maintained to the end and the applause was warmly genuine.
What followed might have created drama of a different order, but happily didn’t. We were told that guides from MountainZone and Mountain Rescue would guide those of us who were leaving the mountain, and not to move without them.
But while these guides were present, they were not at all easily identifiable, so most people made their own way down, some with considerable difficulty, in pitch darkness apart from their own torches.
The adventure offered by this event cannot by its nature be entirely risk-free. But the organisers would do well to tighten the safety protocols to ensure, as far as possible, that it is not marred by accidents in future.
For those of us who stayed, the magic continued, with a most welcome and tasty dinner of beef stroganoff and tuna pasta around the tents, produced by MountainZone’s founder Michael Whelan. While we didn’t get the benefit of starlight, apart from a single brief planet, it was still a very atmospheric meal.
Extraordinary
A dull grey dawn initially seemed a poor reward for fitful sleep on hard, cold ground. But a call from Whelan that the clouds were lifting propelled me out of my sleeping bag.
Then something quite extraordinary happened. A still insipid sunrise to the east somehow projected an intense lightshow on the coum’s cliffs to the west, suffusing the whole amphitheatre in soft pinks.
One of the campers compared the moment to seeing Uluru, the sacred aboriginal site also known as Ayer’s Rock in Australia. It didn’t seem to be an exaggeration.
After possibly the best, or certainly the most welcome, scrambled eggs I’ve ever eaten, we scattered across the coum, following our own instincts and interests.
Crawling into a natural lean-to created by several huge glacial erratic rocks, my eye was caught by several colonies of a small green plant apparently growing directly on the stone surface.
It turned out to be, almost certainly, St Patrick’s Cabbage, a saxifrage that is part of Ireland’s mysterious Lusitanian flora, which somehow found its way here from Iberia. It’s common enough in the south-west, but very hard to find elsewhere.
It was an agreeable conclusion to one of the most unusual festival events I have attended.
