Bobby expresses his confusion at the extravagant embodied devotion and extreme austerity of the pilgrimage to Lough Derg and that it exposes a side of Jenny that he has never seen before.
"I visited the far famed terrestrial purgatory of Lough Derg, but received no benefit from my turas except a severe cold, which I attribute more to the wet mountain bogs that surround the lake, and to the chillyness (chilliness) of the wind than to…
"The author of the following brief sketch, on first receiving a copy of the statistical queries, was for a considerable time in doubt whether to forward any answer to the inquiries proposed..."
"Lough Derg is a large sheet of water surrounded by black bogs relieved only by few detached cabins and patches of cultivation and its groups of islands..."
"Do not visit Saints' Island with expectation of finding carved stones, a clear ground plan of ancient buildings, or examples of early Christian masonry..."
"[Lough Derg] is one of the loneliest places on earth. Its boulder-strewn shores, thirteen miles in circumference, seem to have retained all their original wildness..."