A Modern Irish Pilgrimage That Folklorists Trace to This Festival

Folklorists studying Irish popular religion have long argued that Reek Sunday, the annual Catholic pilgrimage up Croagh Patrick in County Mayo on the last Sunday of July, close to the traditional date of Lughnasadh, continues a much older pattern of communal hilltop gathering associated with the Lughnasadh season, pointing to the mountain's continued association with harvest blessing, its geographic and calendar proximity to the older festival, and comparable hilltop assembly customs recorded at other sites around the same time of year across Ireland historically.

Whether any given individual practice at Croagh Patrick today descends in an unbroken line from pre-Christian Lughnasadh custom, or represents an independently Christian devotional practice that happens to fall in the same season on a similarly prominent hill, is difficult to establish with certainty from the available historical record, and folklorists disagree on how much continuity to claim; what is not disputed is that thousands of pilgrims, some climbing barefoot as a penitential practice, still ascend the mountain every year in the same July and August season the Gaelic calendar once marked as the turn toward harvest, whatever the exact line of descent between the two observances turns out to be.