"Rip Van Winkle whose experience is reversed"

"Rip Van Winkle whose experience is reversed"

Lough Derg--Pilgrimage--Description--Alice Curtayne

Alice Curtayne describes how traveling to Station Island is like stepping back into the fifth century

Alice Curtayne, 1898-1981

Curtayne, Alice, Lough Derg: St. Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 167

Burns Oats and Washbourn, Ltd., London and Dublin

1944

Citation for the purposes of criticism

Monograph

English

History

DD_0144

54.6083, -7.8714

"Whether the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Purgatory knows it or not, he is a sort of Rip Van Winkle whose experience is reversed: he finds himself catapulted back from the twentieth century into the fifth. If he goes there for the first time, he is on a voyage of discovery in which he will gain experiential knowledge of the past, not merely in his mind but in his very body. The Patrician age endures on the island and fifteen hundred years are almost as though they had never been. Unrivaled peace and isolation give him complete freedom to savour this experience."

Monograph