The Lough Derg pilgrimage

Chambers tells the medieval legend of St Patrick’s Purgatory, a cave on an island in Lough Derg where the knight Owen was said to have passed through the pains of purgatory and returned. The cave was closed by papal order in 1497 and the buildings pulled down in 1623, but the pilgrimage never stopped, and in Chambers’s day it ran every year from the first of June to the fifteenth of August. The pilgrims spent twenty-four hours in the chapel called the prison without food or sleep, and walked barefoot and knelt on the rocky paths called the saints’ beds. It was believed that if anyone fell asleep in the prison the devil might carry off the whole company, so the women brought pins and the men sticks to keep their neighbours awake. The pilgrimage season on Lough Derg still opens in June.