Browse Items · Digital Derg: A Deep Map

"In the end, all were obliged to return to the mainland and wait in the ferry house until the storm subsided"

"Although the transit to Station Island takes only ten minutes in normal conditions, there was not even this interval of calm all that day from nine o'clock in the morning until eight in the evening..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, twentieth century

"A fantastic display of lightning which continued for nearly two hours"

"Fourteen years passed [from 1918] before there is mention in the records of another such violent upheaval of the waters…"

Tags: Alice Curtayne, lake, lightning, mountains, pilgrim crossing, sound, Station Island, storms, thunder, twentieth century, water, weather

"The very strangeness of the whole rite is like an old memory overlaid by time"

"Many a pilgrim who goes to the Island for the first time remarks that the most surprising feature of the place is its obscure familiarity..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, cultural memory, pilgrimage, pilgrims, repetition, Station Island, stations, timelessness, twentieth century

"In going there they are answering the call for blood"

"Most pilgrims develop for this rocky island and its harsh routine an affection that really defies explanation..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, blood, Catholicism, cultural memory, essentialism, ethnohistory, exile, familiarity, Irish identity, medievalism, nostalgia, pilgrimage, Station Island, timelessness, twentieth century

The journey of five women returning to Ireland in 1922

"The adventure of a group of five women pilgrims [in 1922] were typical of the times."

Tags: 1922, Alice Curtayne, Castlederg, civil war, County Fermanagh, County Tyrone, disruption, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, Pettigo, pilgrimage, pilgrims, train, twentieth century, Victoria Bridge, women's history

"Rip Van Winkle whose experience is reversed"

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

Tags: 'Celtic' monasticism, Alice Curtayne, fifth century, isolation, medievalism, nostalgia, peace, pilgrimage, remoteness, repetition, timelessness, twentieth century

"A mountain-locked lake that is just as secluded to-day as when Saint Patrick was attracted to its solitude"

A description of the timeless nature of Lough Derg, a window into the early days of Irish Christianity

Tags: Alice Curtayne, beauty, Croaghbrack townland, mountains, sunrise, sunset, timelessness, twentieth century, view, view east, view west, vista

"The shaft on which this iron cross is set is precious, for it was salvaged from the lake"

"The pilgrim then walks to St. Patrick's Cross, a poor but cherished relic made of rude iron and set on a very ancient stone column..."

Tags: 1632, Alice Curtayne, destruction of built heritage, lake, pilgrimage, re-use, Reformation, seventeenth century, spoliation, St. Patrick's Cross, Station Island, stations, submerged objects, twentieth century, water

"Recited in the open, while facing the airy spaciousness of mountain, sky and water"

"The repetition of the baptismal vow [before St. Brigid's Cross] is a reaching back again towards baptismal innocence and is the usual ritual of retreats..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, baptism, contemplation, crowds, environment, isolation, landscape, mountains, pilgrimage, pilgrims, repetition, retreat, St. Brigid's Cross, Station Island, stations, timelessness, twentieth century, weather

"The stones become doubly slippery and the whole slope acquires a slithery and greasy surface"

"The stone circles [of the Penitential Beds] are small. When this sanctuary was demolished in the seventeenth century the despoilers left only the rude foundation stones protruding from the soil..."

Tags: Alice Curtayne, outcrops, penitential beds, pilgrimage, pilgrims, rain, rocks, slippery, Station Island, stations, stones, twentieth century, weather

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