Dan MacCarthy: Caher under umbrella of faith
Dwarfed by its huge island neighbours of Clare Island, Inishturk and Inishboffin, the small island of Caher is of huge historic importance, writes .
The daytripper setting out from Roonagh Quay in southwestern Co Mayo to any of these magnificent islands may be unaware of the significance of this wedge-shaped island that they cruise past.
From the brooding sandstone hulk of Connemara’s highest mountain Mweelrea at 814m, the Atlantic Ocean presents a myriad of islands.
The aforementioned form a significant part of the picture but other islands look fairly sizeable: Inishdegil Mor at the foot of the mountain and Crump Island where eagles dare, catch the eye. Caher is just one of many. However, the level is in the detail.
Caher is about 8km from Roonagh Quay with Inishturk another 5km distant into the Atlantic swell. There is no pier, so boatmen shelter in the east of the island and can take a small punt ashore if the swell allows. Even then, clambering up over the rock is difficult. It is as though nature has confronted us with such barriers to test our mettle.
Caher or Cathair na Naomh in Irish translates as the City of the Saints. The island, now depopulated of course, once supported a small community of monks in the seventh and eighth centuries whose diet was sustained by crops grown on its 128 acres.
Similar communities lived on Inishmurray in Co Sligo and High Island in Co Galway, and of course Skellig Mor in Co Kerry. Archaeologists have traced a connection with Lindisfarne, Northumberland to Caher where slabs known as pillow stones stood at the top of a grave on that island also.
Pilgrims visit many Irish islands in the summer months among them Scariff in Co Kerry, and Macdara’s Island Co Galway. Caher is part of the circuit where people come to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption.
It was reputedly the westernmost point for the peregrination of St Patrick himself on his pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in the year 440.
Three artefacts on the island bear his name: a small church within a cashel (high wall), the remains of a stone fort, and a flat stone at the entrance to the church known as Leaba Phádraic — St Patrick’s Bed. This was thought to have curative powers and among its gifts was a cure for epilepsy.
Patrick is even suggested to have been interred on Caher. A cursing stone on the altar is known as leach na naomh to which people in trouble would approach and rotate. This act would unleash a great storm and provoke vengeance on behalf of the aggrieved.
For years, passing sailors were said to dip their sails on passing the island and to invoke Patrick’s protection with the prayer “Umhluimid do Dhia mhor na huile chomhachta agus do Phadraig miorbhuilteach” — “we make reverence to the great god of all the powers and to St Patrick the wonder- worker”.
In latter years there have been huge numbers of dolphins and other cetaceans in Irish waters but to find dolphins represented on one of the 14 Christian slabs on Caher is remarkable. Equally surprising is the representation of a Greek cross on the same slab.
Whether this indicates direct contact with the Orthodox tradition is not known but it does indicate influence and for that reason is hugely important in ecclesiastical discourse.
Other tombs on the island from the 16th century may relate to a massacre by the pirate queen Granuaile of the MacMahon clan in revenge for an attack by them for the death of her lover.
Nowadays, Inishturk islanders have commonage rights on Caher for sheep grazing. Of much more ancient provenance than St Patrick is the geology: manifold striations attest to the cauldron of earthly and glacial upheavals that renders Caher a jewel in the endless seascape.
