A friend phoned on Easter Monday and happened to say he was heading for St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg in Donegal. I said, “I don’t think it’s open to pilgrims yet.”
He said he wasn’t going on pilgrimage. He just wanted to get holy water from St Brigid’s well on the lake shore. And since I was passing through Laghey later in the day, he suggested I might join him.
We met at the filling station, had a coffee, and drove in my car down a winding country road flanked with whitethorn bushes towards Pettigo.
The entrance to Lough Derg car park, pier and reception area, from which location pilgrims journey to the island to mortify their bodies, is a grim gateway with a metal arch proclaiming the words Purgatorium Sancti Patricii in unsentimental grey lettering. I was hoping to take a few pictures of my friend at the well, so I brought the camera with me – the one I found on Done Deal.
The young woman who sold it to me said it had been a gift from her boyfriend, but then they broke up and she no longer had the heart to use it. So the camera is precious because of this provenance.
The camera is not an inanimate object; it’s an organic instrument that draws me deep into the world around me
In sharing her story, the original owner gave me a gift. I imagine her sorrow is embedded in the camera, and sometimes I feel the lens points at things without me guiding it. Of course the lens is merely an extension of my own eye, but I fancy it has a particular focus that notices details I might otherwise miss. Whatever is poignant in the world, or whatever empty space resonates with melancholy seems to attract the eye of the camera; whether that be a lonely swan on a lake near Drumshanbo, or the tiny figure of an elderly man in the distance on a Donegal beach, or the blank faces of people at bus stops in Dublin.
I’ve never had this experience with my iPhone. Phone-cameras function so well that they are ultimately meaningless. Grabbing selfies on the patio or pictures of relatives with ludicrously gleeful faces in restaurants is not an art form worth wasting time on.
[ Michael Harding: I went home to my microphone, and my invisible companionsOpens in new window ]
But the sorrowful camera draws me into a relationship with a hidden presence in the world. The camera is not an inanimate object; it’s an organic instrument that draws me deep into the world around me.
I shared this opinion with my friend, who said I was completely mad. We were standing beside St Brigid’s well. The large stone buildings on Station Island across the water were emerging from the mist like a prison fortress.
The midges would eat the face off the pilgrims as they staggered in circles around the low stone walls of each station, reciting prayers
“Sure I suppose we’re all mad in this country,” says he.
Then he submerged a two-litre plastic container into the holy well and allowed the water to flow in.
“It’s Easter,” he explained. “My mother used to do this every year.”
“Were you ever on the pilgrimage?” I wondered.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t be that crazy. But the mother was doing it well into her 70s.”
I said I did it three times as a young man.
“The midges would eat the face off the pilgrims as they staggered in circles around the low stone walls of each station, reciting prayers. They would stand on the shoreline reciting more prayers and stand against the wall of the Basilica with outstretched arms, their backs to a cross carved in the wall, renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil.”
[ Michael Harding: I see my late mother in the mirror since I went on heart tabletsOpens in new window ]
I didn’t like that bit; at 18 I blushed with embarrassment as I renounced “the world, the flesh and the devil” in front of all the other young people waiting their turn.
“We’re a mad country,” he repeated with defiant relish, as he slung two litres of holy water into the back of my Toyota.
“Three days with only black tea and water biscuits, a full night vigil without sleep, and twoand a half days walking around in a cloud of midges,” I declared, summing up the wonders of the island in the lake.
“Would you do it again?” he wondered.
“Not a chance,” I confessed. “The fire of zeal turns to ash in old age.”
When he was getting out of the car at Laghey, I noticed the camera still on the back seat of the car. I had not used it at the well. For some reason I forgot it, or perhaps there was a part of the lake and the empty sky that still felt like a presence behind a veil, a space that no camera lens can penetrate.